The BLAC CAD research group focuses on combinatorial optimization. Previously, much of our effort was on VLSI computer aided design problems. The placement tools feng shui and Vaastu were developed by the group. More recently, our focus has shifted into problems arising in biology.

NEWS:

 
  • 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

 

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