Generating New Benchmark Designs using a Multi-terminal Net Model

For the development and evaluation of CAD-tools for the layout, placement, and routing of digital designs and for the evaluation of new computer hardware, a huge amount of benchmark circuits is required. Observing the lack of enough real benchmark designs for use in evaluation tools, one could consider to actually generate such benchmarks. In that case, it is very important that those synthetic benchmarks have the same characteristics as real designs. This paper describes and evaluates a new benchmark generation procedure that produces benchmarks with characteristics, similar to those of real benchmark designs. It will be shown that, in this respect, our new technique outperforms an existing method, presented by Darnauer and Dai [1]. Keywords: Benchmark generation, Net degree distribution, Rent's rule. 1 Introduction The production of VLSI and ULSI computer chips requires the layout (placement and routing) of the chip design on a carrier. With the advent of high level descrip..