Sequence-pair approach for rectilinear module placement

With the recent advent of deep sub-micron technology and new packaging schemes such as multichip modules, integrated circuit components are often not rectangular. Most existing block placement approaches, however, only deal with rectangular blocks, resulting in inefficient area utilization. New approaches which can handle arbitrarily shaped blocks are essential to achieve high-performance design. In this paper, we extend the sequence-pair approach for rectangular block placement to arbitrarily sized and shaped rectilinear blocks. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves results with excellent area utilization.