Diffusion-based placement migration

Placement migration is the movement of cells within an existing placement to address a variety of post-placement design closure issues, such as timing, routing congestion, signal integrity, and heat distribution. To fix a design problem, one would like to perturb the design as little as possible while preserving the integrity of the original placement. This work presents a new diffusion-based placement method based on a discrete approximation to a closed form solution of the continuous diffusion equation. It has the advantage of smooth spreading, which helps preserve neighborhood characteristics of the original placement. Applying this technique to placement legalization demonstrates significant improvements in wire length and timing compared to other commonly used techniques.