In this paper, we propose an improved network-flow based multi-way circuit partitioning algorithm whose objective is to minimize the number of sub-circuits. It iteratively extracts a size-maximal feasible sub-circuit one at a time. In our approach, two devices are applied. One is in the use of an exact min-cut graph, and the other is in the idea of keeping the number of I/O pins of the residual circuit as small as possible after one-time extraction. We implemented our algorithm in C for experiments, and tested it with several industrial cases and MCNC benchmarks. Compared to the known approach, we observed more than 10% reduction in average of the sub-circuit number.

We improve the algorithm to obtain the min-cut graph of a hyper-graph and show an application to the sub-network extraction problem. The min-cut graph is a directed acyclic graph whose directed cuts correspond one-to-one to the min-cuts of the hyper-graph. While the known approach trades the exactness of the min-cut graph for some speed improvement, our proposed algorithm gives an exact one without substantial computation overhead. By using the exact min-cut graph, an exhaustive algorithm finds an optimal sub-circuit that is extracted by a min-cut from the circuit. By experiments with the industrial data, the proposing method showed a performance enough for practical use.