Simulated annealing has been applied to circuit placement.

Suppose that a circuit contains 500 gates and that no more than 300 gates can be put on one chip. How can gates be assigned to two chips so that:

1. The number of connections (pins) between chips is minimized.

2. Gates are roughly evenly divided among chips.

A ``move'' is made by moving one gate to the opposite chip. Temperature is reduced ( * 0.9 ) when:

1. Each gate has been moved 10 times, or

2. Attempted moves exceed 100 per gate.

Simulated annealing produced a solution with about half as many pins as hill climbing from a random starting state.

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