VLSI block placement using less flexibility first principles

A deterministic algorithm for VLSI block placement was developed in this paper through human's accumulated experience in solving "packing" problem. Rectangle packing problem is just a simplified case of the polygon-shape stone plate packing problem that the ancient masons needed to face. Several "packing" principles derived from the so-called "less flexibility first" experience of the masons. A k-d tree data structure is used for manipulating the packed rectangles under the derived packing principles. Experiment results demonstrate that the algorithm is effective and promising in building block layout application.

[1]  Chak-Kuen Wong,et al.  An effective quasi-human based heuristic for solving the rectangle packing problem , 2002, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[2]  Jin Xu,et al.  Cluster refinement for block placement , 1997, DAC.

[3]  H. Murata,et al.  Rectangle-packing-based module placement , 1995, ICCAD 1995.

[4]  Hidetoshi Onodera,et al.  Branch-and-bound placement for building block layout , 1991, 28th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.

[5]  C. L. Liu,et al.  A New Algorithm for Floorplan Design , 1986, DAC 1986.

[6]  Jon Louis Bentley,et al.  Multidimensional binary search trees used for associative searching , 1975, CACM.

[7]  Yici Cai,et al.  Corner block list: an effective and efficient topological representation of non-slicing floorplan , 2000, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design. ICCAD - 2000. IEEE/ACM Digest of Technical Papers (Cat. No.00CH37140).

[8]  Yoji Kajitani,et al.  Module placement on BSG-structure and IC layout applications , 1996, ICCAD 1996.

[9]  Takeshi Yoshimura,et al.  An O-tree representation of non-slicing floorplan and its applications , 1999, DAC '99.