Fast floorplanning by look-ahead enabled recursive bipartitioning

A new paradigm is introduced for floorplanning any combination of fixed-shape and variable-shape blocks under tight fixedoutline area constraints and a wirelength objective. Dramatic improvement over traditional floorplanning methods is achieved by explicit construction of strictly legal layouts for every partition block at every level of a cutsize-driven, top-down hierarchy. By scalably incorporating legalization into the hierarchical flow, post-hoc legalization is successfully eliminated. For large floorplanning benchmarks, an implementation, called PATOMA, generates solutions with half the wirelength of state-of-the-art floorplanners in orders of magnitude less run time. Experiments on standard GSRC industry benchmarks compare an implementation, called PATOMA, to the Traffic floorplanner and to both the default and high-effort modes of the Parquet-2 floorplanner. With all blocks hard, PATOMA’s average wirelength is 38% shorter than Traffic’s in the same run time. With all ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Jason Cong, Michail Romesis, Joseph R. Shinnerl
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2005, PATOMA’s Average Wirelength, Run Time, Tight fixedoutline Area