A matrix synthesis approach to thermal placement

In this paper, we consider the thermal placement problem for gate arrays. We introduce a new combinatorial optimization problem, matrix synthesis problem (MSP), to model the thermal placement problem. Given a list of mn nonnegative real numbers and an integer t, MSP constructs a m x n matrix out of the given numbers such that the maximum sum among all t x t submatrices is minimized. We show that MSP is NP-complete and present several provably good approximation algorithms for the problem. We also demonstrate that our thermal placement strategy is flexible enough to allow simultaneous consideration of other objectives such as wiring.