Clustering based simulated annealing for standard cell placement.

Simulated annealing is a powerful general purpose optimization technique which has been used for several difficult problems in the area of VLSI Design, including the standard cell placement problem. Its main disadvantage is the long time it takes to converge, even to a near-optimal solution, which increases significantly with the problem size. This memorandum presents an effective technique to mitigate this problem for standard cell placement without compromising the quality of the solution.