A force directed partitioning algorithm for 3D floorplanning

Partitioning is very important to 3D IC physical design. Currently, hMetis (most famous partitioning software package) is widely used for partitioning. However, hMetis is for partitioning of hyper graphs. When the method is used for layer assignment of 3D floorplan/placement, some net might be too long. This paper develops a partitioning algorithm for 3D floorplan. The proposed combines a cost-based heuristic and force directed algorithm, which places the nodes considering attractive force and repulsive force, in order to solve the long net problem. We consider both the wire length and the number of TSVs in this work. The second part of the algorithm has two kinds according to the different emphasis. The experimental results demonstrated our algorithms can effectively reduce the wire length and the number of TSV. By comparing the experimental results of two focuses, we can get the differences and strengths of the two algorithms separately.