A hierarchical placement system based on routing region assignment has been developed to increase the probability of routing completion after placement. While most of the existing placement systems attempt to reduce the cell density at the portions where routing density is high, our method is distinguished in that specific routing regions are allocated to secure complete routing where the routing density is greater than the routing capacity. Hierarchy is vuilt by clustering and recursive paritioning, and the initial placement obtained by partitioning at each level is improved by using the region refinement algorithm. After placement at each hierarchical level, global routing is performed and fouting regions are assigned, if routing density is greater than routing capacity, to be considered at the next level of placement. the proposed algorithm has been implemented and applied to place several industrical gate-array circuits. A couple of circuits which cannot be routed by using conventional placement techniques can be completely routed by using our new placement technique with routing region assignment.