ePlace-3D: Electrostatics based Placement for 3D-ICs

Abstract: We propose a flat, analytic, mixed-size placement algorithm ePlace-3D for three-dimension integrated circuits (3D-ICs) using nonlinear optimization. Our contributions are (1) electrostatics based 3D density function with globally uniform smoothness (2) 3D numerical solution with improved spectral formulation (3) 3D nonlinear pre-conditioner for convergence acceleration (4) interleaved 2D-3D placement for efficiency enhancement. Our placer outperforms the leading work mPL6-3D and NTUplace3-3D with 6.44% and 37.15% shorter wirelength, 9.11% and 10.27% fewer 3D vertical interconnects (VI) on average of IBM-PLACE circuits. Validation on the large-scale modern mixed-size (MMS) 3D circuits shows high performance and scalability.