Modern Floorplanning with Boundary Clustering Constraint

Abstract

With the development of SOC designs, modern floorplanning typically needs to provide extra options to meet the different emerging requirements in the hierarchical designs, such as boundary constraint for I/O connection, clustering constraint for performance and reliability, etc. This paper addresses modern floorplanning with boundary clustering constraint. It has been empirically shown that the modern constraints extremely restrict the solution space; that is, a large number of randomly generated floorplans might be infeasible. In order to effectively search the feasible solutions, the feasible conditions based on B*-tree representation with boundary clustering constraint are investigated. The properties, coupled with an efficient simulated annealing algorithm, provide the way to produce feasible floorplans by dynamic repairing, which can transform an infeasible solution into a feasible one if the constraint is violated. Our algorithm is verified by using the MCNC and GSRC benchmarks, and the empirical results show that our algorithm can obtain promising solutions in acceptable time