Title: Artificial bee colony for the standard cell placement problem

Authors: Najwa Altwaijry; Mohamed El Bachir Menai

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, P.O. Box 51178, Riyadh 11453, Saudi Arabia ' Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, P.O. Box 51178, Riyadh 11453, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Placement is an important step in the VLSI design process, of which standard cell placement (SCP) is a well-studied problem. The four 'pure' major algorithms for placement include simulated annealing, quadratic placement, min-cut placement, and force-directed placement. The four pure algorithms are inadequate for today's complex problems; hybrid methods are better able to solve the current SCP problem sizes. The objective of this paper is to present a swarm intelligence-based method for SCP. The method used to solve the SCP problem is the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, in conjunction with hMetis, a partitioning package. Our artificial bee colony PLacer tool (abcPL), has been tested on the PEKU benchmark suite. Results obtained show that ABC is a promising approach for solving the SCP problem.

Keywords: VLSI design; standard cell placement; artificial bee colony; ABC; metaheuristics; swarm intelligence.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2013.056402

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2013 Vol.2 No.3, pp.234 - 255

Received: 01 Feb 2013
Accepted: 10 Jun 2013
Published online: 05 Jul 2014 *

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