Floating Steiner Trees
We study the reproducing placement problem, which finds application in layout-driven logic synthesis. In each phase, a module (or gate) is decomposed into two (or more) simpler modules. The goal is to find a "good" placement in each phase. The problem, being iterative in nature, requires an iterative algorithm. In solving the RPP, we introduce the notion of minimum floating Steiner trees (MFST). We employ an MFST algorithm as a central step in solving the RPP. A Hanan-like theorem is established for the MFST problem, and two approximation algorithms are proposed. Experiments on commonly employed benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique.