Slicing floorplans with pre-placed modules

Abstract

Existing floorplanners that use slicing floorplans are efficient in runtime and yet can pack modules tightly. However, none of them can handle pre-placed modules. In this paper, we extend a well-known slicing floorplanner to handle pre-placed modules. Our main contribution is a novel shape curve computation procedure which can take the positions of the pre-placed modules into consideration. The shape curve computation procedure is used repeatedly during the floorplanning process to fully exploit the shape flexibility of the modules to give a tight packing. Experimental results show that the extended floorplanner performs very well.