Global routing driven floorplanning

Abstract

A novel global routing driven floorplanning approach is presented. Rectangular cells such as in macrocell design are considered. The major contributions of the paper are: (1) a new model for the prediction of shape functions which enables one to consider a more general class of floorplan representations. (2) An improved two-dimensional partitioning procedure. (3) A dynamic updating scheme that considers interconnect area around each cell during the floorplan assembly. The technique supports a global perspective and considers simultaneously different design goals. An analytic-based optimization technique is applied for port allocation. Experimental results from industrial examples with many irregular cells show a considerable improvement over previous attempts.<>