Yield-aware floorplanning

Abstract

Yield is normally ignored during the floorplanning stage. Recently, it has been shown that floorplanning can affect the yield with the increased sizes of chips. With the "medium-area clustering" model, yield can be evaluated during the floorplanning stage. Therefore, it's straightforward to incorporate yield in modern floorplanners. However, conventional simulate-annealing (SA) based moves are only designed for the combination of the area and/or the wire length minimizations. In this paper, we proposed a heuristic scheme of "moves" directly targeting on the yield improvement. The experimental results show a great yield improvement with little penalty for the area and/or the total wire length.