Research related to circuit design has been put on a back burner; the focus of the group is on different problems. Material on the site may be out of date. Old versions of our placement tools are available, as are some physical design benchmarks.
NEWS:
- 2007/06/01. Time for a new direction.
- 2007/04/12-13. Patrick will be in Monterey for EDPS, where he'll be program co-chair. Time for the annual multicore-is-a-bad-idea rumble! The talk will revolve around Amdahl's Law. An extended abstract for the talk is available.
- 2007/03/16-21. Patrick and Satoshi are in Austin for ISPD. Patrick is the general chair this year.
- 2007/01/21-27. Patrick, Ameya, and Satoshi are in Yokohama for ASPDAC. Ameya will present a paper on Vaastu (new analytic placer, and best paper nominee), while Satoshi will present XPlace.
- 2006/11/21. Ameya Agnihotri defends his dissertation, and is subsequently off to Magma.
- 2006/03/15. Patrick will be in Singapore to give an invited
talk at National University
of Singapore.
- 2006/03/07. Many thanks to Sun
Microsystems for providing access (and a LOT of hours) on
their compute grid. The group is branching out to focus on
general purpose large scale combinatorial optimization.
- 2006/01/15. Welcome aboard to a few new undergrad
researchers in the group. James Simone, Dan Benamy, and Ari
Fuchs are now involved in the research.
- 2006/11/15. Congratulations to the Binghamton ACM ICPC
contest team for placing second in the Northeast North America
region (beating out Harvard, Brown, and a host of others). One
of the team members, Andrew Paroski, is part of the BLACCAD
research group. The team will travel to San Antonio in April to
compete in the World Finals.
- 2005/07/20. feng shui 5.1 in both command line and GUI versions is available. We have builds for Debian 3.0 (woody), Debian 3.1 (sarge), Mandrake 10, and Fedora Core 3, all on x86. We are planning a Solaris release shortly. If you have already registered, you can go directly to the download page.
- 2005/04/04. feng shui 5.0 command line placer is available. Documentation on this and the yet-to-be-released GUI version are on line here. Note: the half perimeter wire lengths reported may not be accurate--a bug has been found in the cell mirroring code, and we are in the progress of fixing it. For the short term, please use the GSRC wire length calculator to get HPWL numbers.
- 2005/04/04. Our placement benchmark result site is up; we will be uploading results from feng shui 5.0, and other tools, shortly. You can upload your own if you want, and browse the archives.
- 2005/04/04--2005/04/10. Patrick will be in San Francisco and Monterey for ISPD and EDP.
- 2005/02/23--2005/03/05. Patrick will visit National Taiwan University to give a couple of talks, and then will continue on to Cambodia and Thailand, before returning to Kitakyushu.
- 2005/01/18. Patrick and Satoshi will be in Shanghai for ASPDAC, to
present papers on the structural placer, and on the branch-and-price
detailed placement technique. Also at ASPDAC will be a collaborative paper with the Purdue team, on incremental placement. The new release of Feng Shui is almost
ready!
- 2004/11 Patrick, Satoshi,
and Ameya will be in San Jose for ICCAD. A new release of Feng Shui,
version 5.0, will be available soon. This release features both the
recursive bisection based placement engine, as well as the structural
mode that will be presented at ASPDAC05. Additionally, the new release
sports a GUI, integration with our global and detail routers, and a
delay analysis tool that uses commercial-grade STA techniques.
- 2004/06/07. Patrick, Satoshi,
and Ameya will be in San Diego for DAC. We're releasing Feng
Shui 2.6, which supports standard cell and mixed block design. The
binary also includes a "structural" mode that works very well for certain
types of designs (primarily the PEKO benchmarks).
- 2004/05/17. Patrick will
head to Japan, for a sabbatical.
- 2004/05/05. Harold Fennell
defends his MS thesis on web based software development.
- 2004/05/03. Ateen defends
his MS thesis on mixed block placement.
- 2004/03/23-24. Patrick will
go to Purdue for a PhD committee meeting, and to discuss research on
an SRC project.
- 2004/03/18-21. Patrick and
Ameya will be in Phoenix for ISPD 2004.
Ameya will present a paper on mixed block placement. Our mixed block
placement tool, Feng Shui, obtains wire length reductions of 29% over
Capo, and 26% over mPG-ms, on average. The paper is available here,
on the SIGDA proceedings archives, or
on the ISPD web site. The ISPD site
will also contain slides from the talk. The currently released binary
is version 2.2; we have distributed beta versions of 2.5 to a handful
of research groups. Version 2.6, which contains a number of changes
that improve stability, reduce wire length, and fix an integer overflow
problem on some industry circuits, should be available shortly. Follow
the links for "software" to download the
latest version.
- 2004/03/15. Patrick will
be in Austin to give a talk at the IBM research labs. Ameya will also
visit.
- 2004/03/29. Patrick travels
to Kitakyushu Japan, for the start of the academic year. He will be
on sabbatical, starting at the end of the Binghamton spring semester,
until Fall 2005. Photos are on-line.
During the year, he will be a visiting faculty member at the University
of Kitakyushu School
of Environmental Engineering, Department
of Information and Media Sciences.
- 2004/03/12. Prof. Purush
Damodaran will go to IBM TJ Watson for a presentation; Patrick will
also attend.
- 2004/02/07. Patrick will
be in NYC for the GLSVLSI TPC meeting, and a SIGDA board meeting.
- 2004/01/23. Patrick will
be at TJ Watson for a research meeting.
- 2004/01. Satoshi, Sameer,
and Jay all defend their MS work. Satoshi will continue for his PhD.
- 2004/01/15. Patrick, Ateen,
Jay, and Sameer will be in NYC for the annual MDC conference.
- 2003/11. Feng Shui 2.0,
a new version of our placement tool that has support for both standard
cells and movable macro blocks, has been made available in binary form.
- 2003/11. Patrick, Ameya,
Satoshi, and Ateen will be in San Jose for ICCAD 2003; Patrick will
present a paper on Feng Shui 2.0.
- 2003/10/16. Patrick will
be in San Diego for the SRC CADTS meeting.
- 2003/08/01. Mehmet Can Yildiz
sucessfully defends his PhD, and is the first doctoral grad from the
research group. Mehmet has joined IBM Austin Research Labs, and will
be working on a bunch of stuff he can't tell us about.
- Error in an ISPD table!
The total wire lengths for table 5 in the recent ISPD paper are inflated
due to a bug in one of our extraction tools. The general trend (heavy
bias towards horizontal routing) is correct, but total wire lengths
for all tools is increased. A corrected table will be available shortly.
We will upload a corrected version to the ISPD and SIGDA web sites.
- 2003/06/02-06. Ryon, Mehmet,
Satoshi, Sameer, Ajita, Raia, Ameya, and Patrick, were in Anaheim for
DAC2003. Raia presented work from her
MS Thesis, "Improved Global Routing through Amplified Congestion
Estimation," paper 3-3s. Satoshi and Ameya manned a SIGDA
University Booth demo of the tools (particularly the placement and
routing engines). Ryon was hanging out at the InternetCAD
booth, as he'll work as an intern again this summer.
- 2003/05. Mehmet and Patrick
visit IBM Austin Research Labs, to present work on placement. Mehmet
will join the group this fall as a post-doc.
- 2003/05. Patrick will be
at IBM TJW in Yorktown Heights and at IBM Fishkill to talk about placement
and routing.
- 2003/05. Raia Hadsell completes
her MS thesis work, and graduates. She was selected as the Computer
Science department "Outstanding Graduate Student"!
- 2003/04/28. Ameya will present
"Congestion Reduction in New and Traditional Routing Architectures"
at GLSVLSI2003.
- 2003/04/06. Patrick, Ryon,
and Mehmet will be in Monterey for ISPD2003.
Patrick and Mehmet are co-authors on a benchmarking
paper. This
paper got a bit of coverage in the EE Times!
- 2003/03/07. Ryon Smey will
present "Crosstalk Reduction in Area Routing" at DATE
2003 in Munich. Patrick goes along as well for a SIGDA board meeting.
- 2003/02/02. Patrika Agarwal
successfully defends her MS thesis; she's now at Tufts in the PhD program.
- 2003/01/13. MDC Workshop
in Rochester; Patrick will talk about multiple voltage placement.
- 2003/01/07. Patrick, Mehmet,
and Raia go to IBM TJW to talk about routing, placement, etc.
- 2002/12/28. Patrika Agarwal
and Arvind Vidyarthi get married! Congratulations to both!
- 2002/11/12-16. Patrick and
Mehmet are in San Jose for ICCAD, a SIGDA board meeting, and the ISPD
TPC meeting.
- 2002/08/20. Jay Dhole, Ateen
Khatkhate and Andrew Cohen join the research group.
- 2002/08/15-20. Arvind Vidyarthi,
Udayan Deshpande, and Ameya Agnihotri all defend their MS thesis work
(on fast delay estimation, mixed block placement, and global routing
layer balancing). Arvind will be joining the PhD program at Tufts; Udayan
will head off to the PhD program at Dartmouth; Ameya will join the PhD
program at Binghamton.
- 2002/08/08. Prof. Madden
visits IBM TJ Watson to discuss multiple voltage placement, global routing,
and RET/OPC/Alt-PSM issues.
- 2002/08/06. Bill Halpin
from Intel visits the the research group.
- 2002/07/01. Prof. Madden
receives an IBM Faculty Award; this will allow more funding for the
research effort on "next generation" physical design.
- 2002/06/20. An grant from
Intel provides four new workstations
for the research lab. In keeping with our science fiction theme, the
new machines are named Logan5, Sandman, Carousel, and Sanctuary.
- 2002/06/07-14. Patrick,
Ryon, Mehmet, Raia, Patrika, Arvind, Udayan, Ameya, Sameer, Satoshi,
and Ajita go to New Orleans for DAC 2002.
We'll demo the latest Feng Shui tools at the University
Booth.
- 2002/06/01. Ryon takes off
to InternetCAD for the summer;
Patrika is with SGI.
- 2002/04/19-21. Patrick,
and better than half the lab, will be in NYC for GLSVLSI
2002.
- 2002/04/07-12. Patrick will
be in San Diego for SLIP2002
and ISPD2002, and then in Santa Clara
for an Intel seminar.
- 2002/03/01-11.
Patrick will be in Paris for DATE
2002.
- 2002/02/01. Funding comes
through from MDC,
to support research on the next generation of physical design automation
tools.
- 2002/01/01. Dr. David Garrison
joins the group, working on cryptography.
- 2002/01/01. Stea Green joins
the group, working on distributed networked simulations.
- 2002/01/01. New students
Raia Hadsell, William Rottach, Sameer Pujari, Ajita Mathur, and Sergey
Royt join the group, working on design automation problems.
- 2002/01/16-17. CEIS/MDC
meeting in NYC
- 2001/12/28. Research group
(and Turkish community) party.
- 2001/12. More paper and
review deadlines than you can shake a stick at.
- 2001/11/16. MS Thesis defense
by Ryon M. Smey, in the T Conference room, 10:30am. Ryon is now in the
PhD program....
- 2001/11/05. Ryon Smey, Mehmet
Yildiz, and Prof. Madden will be in San Jose for ICCAD
2001.
- 2001/10/23. SRC
research review in Minneapolis.
- 2001/09/07. SIGDA
planning meeting in San Antonio.
- 2001/08/15. Mohamed ElAbdellaoui
successfully defends his MS thesis (and is now in sunny California!).
- 2001/07/26. New translations
of the MCNC benchmarks into GSRC
formats are available.
- 2001/07/25. The BLAC CAD
site has started a major redesign. Cool tools like Fireworks and Dreamweaver
make life easy. VMware
lets us run the tools under Red Hat Linux 7.1.
- 2001/07/22. IBM/SRC
Custom Funding for Multiple Voltage Placement approved.
- 2001/07/15. The department
chair has agreed to organize GLSVLSI2002.
The current plan is to hold the symposium outside of New York City in
March; more details to follow....
- 2001/06/21. DAC2001
presentation on Improved Cut Sequences
for Partitioning Based Placement
- 2001/06/15. Good news in
Funding! DAC Graduate
Research Scholarship awarded to the group, to support Mehmet, Ryon,
Patrika, and Arvind!
- 2001/04/02. ISPD2001
presentation on Reporting of Standard
Cell Placement Results
- 2001/03/22. GLSVLSI2001
presentations on Global Objectives for
Standard Cell Placement and Preferred
Direction Steiner Trees
Thanks to:
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