Fast floorplanning by look-ahead enabled recursive bipartitioning

Jason Cong, Michail Romesis, Joseph R. Shinnerl
2005 Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Asia South Pacific design automation - ASP-DAC '05  
A new paradigm is introduced for floorplanning any combination of fixed-shape and variable-shape blocks under tight fixedoutline area constraints and a wirelength objective. Dramatic improvement over traditional floorplanning methods is achieved by explicit construction of strictly legal layouts for every partition block at every level of a cutsize-driven, top-down hierarchy. By scalably incorporating legalization into the hierarchical flow, post-hoc legalization is successfully eliminated. For
more » ... large floorplanning benchmarks, an implementation, called PATOMA, generates solutions with half the wirelength of state-of-the-art floorplanners in orders of magnitude less run time. Experiments on standard GSRC industry benchmarks compare an implementation, called PATOMA, to the Traffic floorplanner and to both the default and high-effort modes of the Parquet-2 floorplanner. With all blocks hard, PATOMA's average wirelength is 38% shorter than Traffic's in the same run time. With all blocks soft, PATOMA on average produces wirelengths 16% shorter than Parquet-2's default mode and runs 37 ¢ faster. Compared to the high-effort mode of Parquet-2, PATOMA's average wirelength is 8% shorter, and it runs 824 ¢ faster, on average.
doi:10.1145/1120725.1120838 dblp:conf/aspdac/CongRS05 fatcat:o6du4ctb2bdhnlqakplpnfk7jy