A problem on rectangular floorplans

Graph theory has been used in floorplanning for VLSI design. In particular, the problem of dissection of a rectangle into smaller rectangles with specified adjacencies has been well studied. In this problem, one has no control over the shapes (or aspect ratios) of any of the rectangles. The author studies the problem of packing rectangles with given areas and prescribed ranges for their aspect ratios into a rectangle of the least area. The problem is shown to be NP-complete. Some interesting special cases are shown to be solvable in polynomial time. Approximation algorithms are discussed for the general use.<<ETX>>