A Unified Method to Handle Different Kinds of Placement Constraints in Floorplan Design

In floorplan design, it is common that a designer will want to control the positions of some modules in the final packing for various purposes like data path alignment, I/O connection, etc.. There are several previous works [7, 9, 8, 4, 1] focusing on a few particular kinds of placement constraint. In this paper, we will present the first "unified method" to handle all of them simultaneously, including pre-placed constraint, range constraint, boundary constraint, alignment, abutment and clustering, etc., in general non-slicing floorplans. We have used incremental updates and an interesting idea of reduced graph to improve the runtime of the algorithm. We tested our method using some benchmark data with about one eighth of the modules having placement constraints and the results is very promising. Good packings with all the constraints satisfied can be obtained efficiently.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: VLSID
• Authors: Evangeline F. Y. Young, Chris C. N. Chu, M. L. Ho
• Keywords: Boundary Constraint, Computer Architecture, Modules Having Placement, Placement Constraint, VLSID 2002