ENHANCING PERFORMANCE OF ITERATIVE HEURISTICS FOR VLSI NETLIST PARTITIONING

In this paper we, present a new heuristic called PowerFM which is a modification of the well-known Fidducia Mattheyeses al-gorithm for VLSI netlist partitioning. PowerFM considers the minimization of power consumption due to the nets cut. The ad-vantages of using PowerFM as an initial solution generator for other iterative algorithms, in panicular Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Tabu Search (TS), for multiobjective optimization is inves-tigated. A series of experiments are conducted on ISCAS-85/89 benchmark circuits to evaluate the efficiency of the PawerFM al-gorithm. Results suggest that this heuristic would provide a good starting solution for multiobjective optimization using iterative algorithms. 1