Electronic design automation is concerned with the design and production of VLSI systems. One of the important steps in creating a VLSI circuit is its physical design. The input to the physical design step is a logical representation of the system under design. The output of this step is the layout of a physical package that optimally or near-optimally realizes the logical representation. Physical design problems are generally combinatorial in nature and have very large problem sizes. In this paper we review genetic algorithms for physical design and observe and analyze the common traits of the superior contributions. For example, many of these investigations use genetic operators that incorporate expert knowledge. We believe this review can stimulate and steer further applications.
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