This paper addresses a Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) design problem that belongs to the NP-hard class. The Gate Matrix Layout problem has strong applications on the chip-manufacturing industry. A Memetic Algorithm is employed to solve a set of benchmark instances, present in previous works in the literature. Beyond the results found for these instances, another goal of this paper is to study how the use of multiple populations and different migration strategies affects the algorithm's performance. This comparison has shown to be fruitful, sometimes producing a strong performance improvement over single population approaches. © Springer-Verlag 2002.2527 LNAI 319328Franca, P.M., Mendes, A., Moscato, P., A memetic algorithm for the total tardiness single machine scheduling problem (2001) European Journal of Operational Research, 132 (1), pp. 224-242. , DOI 10.1016/S0377-2217(00)00140-5, PII S0377221700001405Hu, Y.H., Chen, S.J., GM-Plan: A gate matrix layout algorithm based on artificial intelligence planning techniques (1990) IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, 9, pp. 836-845Lengauer, T., (1990) Combinatorial Algorithms for Integrated Circuit Layout, , John Wiley & Sons, New YorkLinhares, A., Synthesizing a Predatory Search Strategy for VLSI Layouts (1999) IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 3 (2), pp. 147-152Linhares, A., Yanasse, H., Torreão, J., Linear Gate Assignment: A Fast Statistical Mechanics Approach (1999) IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design on Integrated Circuits and Systems, 18 (12), pp. 1750-1758Mendes, A.S., França, P.M., Moscato, P., NP-Opt: An Optimization Framework for NP Problems Proceedings of POM2001 - International Conference of the Production and Operations Management Society (2001), pp. 82-89Moscato, P., On Evolution, Search, Optimization, Genetic Algorithms and Martial Arts: Towards Memetic Algorithms (1989) C3P Report, 826. , Caltech Concurrent Computation ProgramNakatani, K., Fujii, T., Kikuno, T., Yoshida, N., A heuristic algorithm for gate matrix layout Proceedings of International Conference of Computer-Aided Design (1986), pp. 324-327Moscato, P., Norman, M.G., (1992) A 'Memetic' Approach for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Implementation of A Computational Ecology for Combinatorial Optimization on Message-Passing Systems, Parallel Computing and Transputer Applications, pp. 187-194. , edited by M. Valero, E. Onate, M. Jane, J.L. Larriba and B. Suarez, Ed. IOS Press, Amsterdam