Abstract
This paper considers the area-constrained clustering of combinational circuits for delay minimization under a more general delay model, which practically takes variable interconnect delay into account. Our delay model is particularly applicable when allowing the back-annotation of actual delay information to drive the clustering process. We present a vertex grouping technique and integrate it with the algorithm (Rajaraman and Wong, 1995) such that our algorithm can be proved to solve the problem optimally in polynomial time.