Critical problems for a slicing floorplan

Abstract

A slicing floorplan is a geometrical structure obtained by a series of successive dissections of a given rectangle by horizontal or vertical lines. The logical structure of a slicing floorplan can be represented by a binary tree whose leaves denote rectangles of the resulting floorplan and internal nodes specify horizontal and vertical cut lines. The slicing structure is widely used in digital circuit physical design to determine rectangles (or, rooms), where blocks (i.e., separated parts of the digital circuit) should be allocated. The quality of a floorplan is estimated based on the area of its enclosing rectangle and the closeness of logically connected blocks to each other. We suggest a method of transformation of a floorplan to solve several optimization problems such as concentration of predefined blocks around a target point, migration of predefined blocks towards each other, etc. All these transformations are done by keeping the bounding rectangle of the floorplan.