Circuit Partitioning

Circuit partitioning is the task of dividing a circuit into smaller parts. Circuit partitioning is an important aspect of layout for several reasons. Partitioning can be used directly to divide a circuit into portions that are implemented on separate components, such as printed circuit boards or chips. Here the objective is to partition the circuit into parts such that the sizes of the components are within prescribed ranges and the complexity of connections between the components is minimized. A natural way of formalizing the notion of wiring complexity is to attribute to each net in the circuit some connection cost, and to sum the connection costs of all nets connecting different components. The connection cost of a net may express such parameters as the buswidth of the net—that is, the number of bits that have to be sent across the net in parallel. Or the connection cost may serve to assign higher priorities to nets that should not run across component boundaries.