The repeater tree construction problem

A tree-like substructure on a computer chip whose task is to carry a signal from a source circuit to possibly many sink circuits and which consists only of wires and so-called repeater circuits is called a repeater tree. We present a mathematical formulation of the optimization problems related to the construction of such repeater trees. Furthermore, we prove theoretical properties of a simple iterative procedure for these problems which was successfully applied in practice.

Research highlights
► Formulation of the repeater tree construction as a combinatorial optimization problem.
► Simple and flexible procedure for the construction of a repeater tree topology.
► Theoretical performance guarantees of variants of this procedure.