A novel approach for timing-driven placement of very large integrated circuits is presented.Our strategy is to apply clustering technique to a quadratic placement procedure.By clustering

the number of components for placement is reduced considerably.We design a high-efficiency clustering algorithm

named CARGO

which has global optimality and runs very fast.We use a path-based timing-driven quadratic placement algorithm to complete the placement of the condensed circuit.Because quadratic based placement algorithm can mathematically find global optima in very short time

our new approach might be more promising for solving the problem thoroughly.We have tested our algorithm on a set of MCNC circuits and obtained satisfactory results.