Circuit partitioning is an important stage in the very large scale integration (VLSI) physical design automation

which influences further circuit design.The VLSI circuit partitioning problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem.In this paper

we propose a scatter search method for the problem

which incorporates the single-vertex-move based Fiduccia-Mattheyses algorithm (FM) within the scatter search framework.The FM algorithm is used for local exploitation

while the scatter search strategy is used for global exploration.To meet the quality and diversity of initial solutions required by the scatter search method

we incorporate the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with the clustering method to generate initial solutions.Experimental results show that the proposed scatter search algorithm is capable of partitioning large benchmark circuits

and yields results better than those of the well-known multilevel partitioning package hMetis.