ALSO: A system for chip floorplan design

Abstract This paper presents a system to generating non-slicing structure floorplan. The system is divided into initial placement, initial floorplan construction and floorplan packing. In the initial placement algorithm, the area of each module as well as its interconnections are considered and modeled as an unconstrained optimization problem. A penalty is introduced if two modules overlap; the greater is overlap is, the larger the penalty will be. A block packing algorithm is introduced which iteratively compacts the bounding rectangle by changing the shapes of modules according to their shape constraints. A novel feature of the packing algorithm is that modules are “shifted back” to obtain the maximal slack region for modules (a slack region is the dead space mismatches between modules). Experimental results show that this method achieves better area utilization than slicing structure floorplanning approaches, especially when the number of fixed-shaped modules is large.