Multilevel floorplanning/placement for large-scale modules using B*-trees

Abstract

We present in this paper a multilevel floorplanning/placement framework based on the B*-tree representation, called MB*-tree, to handle the floorplanning and packing for large-scale building modules. The MB*-tree adopts a two-stage technique, clustering followed by declustering. The clustering stage iteratively groups a set of modules based on a cost metric guided by area utilization and module connectivity, and at the same time establishes the geometric relations for the newly clustered modules by constructing a corresponding B*-tree for them. The declustering stage iteratively ungroup a set of the previously clustered modules (i.e., perform tree expansion) and then refines the floorplanning/placement solution by using a simulated annealing scheme. In particular, the MB*-tree preserves the geometric relations among modules during declustering, which makes the MB*-tree an ideal data structure for the multilevel floorplanning/placement framework. Experimental results show that the MB*-tree obtains significantly better silicon area and wirelength than previous works. Further, unlike previous works, MB*-tree scales very well as the circuit size increases.