New approach to simultaneous buffer insertion and wire sizing

In this paper, we present a completely new approach to the problem of delay minimization by simultaneous buffer insertion and wire sizing for a wire. We show that the problem can be formulated as a convex quadratic program, which is known to be solvable in polynomial time. Nevertheless, we explore some special properties of our problem and derive an optimal and very efficient algorithm to solve the resulting program. Given m buffers and a set of n discrete choices of wire width, the running time of our algorithm is O(mn²) and is independent of the wire length in practice. For example, an instance of 100 buffers and 100 choices of wire width can be solved in 3 seconds. Besides, our formulation is so versatile that it is easy to consider other objectives like wire area or power dissipation, or to add constraints to the solution. Also, wire capacitance lookup tables, or very general wire capacitance models which can capture area capacitance, fringing capacitance, coupling capacitance, etc. can be used.