NonRectangular Shaping and Sizing of Soft Modules for Floorplan Design Improvement.pdfVIP

Non-Rectangular Shaping and Sizing of Soft Modules for Floorplan Design Improvement Chris C.N. Chu and Evangeline F.Y. Young Abstract Many previous works on floorplanning with non-rectangular modules [8, 13, 4, 5, 6, 3, 10, 11, 12, 1, 15, 2] assume that the modules are pre-designated to have particular non-rectangular shapes, e.g., L-shaped, T-shaped, etc. However, this is not common in practice because rectangular shapes are more preferable in many designing steps. Those non-rectangular shapes are actually generated during floor- planning in order to further optimize the solution. In this paper, we study this problem of changing the shapes and dimensions of the flexible modules to fill up the unused area of a preliminary floorplan, while keeping the relative positions between the modules unchanged. This feature will also be useful in fixing small incremental changes during ECO modifications. We formulate the problem as a mathematical pro- gram. The formulation is such that the dimensions of all the rectangular and non-rectangular modules can be computed by closed form equations in O (m) time where m is the total number of edges in the constraint graphs. Experimental results show that the amount of area re-used is 3.7% on average while the total wirelength can be reduced by 0.43% on average because of the more compacted result packing. 1 Introduction A lot of previous works have then been reported on floorplanning with non-rectangular blocks [13, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 6, 1, 15, 2, 7]. The papers [14, 3] extend the Polish expression representation for slicing floorplans to handle L-shaped and T-shaped modules. The works on non-slicing floorplans are mostly based on the Bounded Sliceline Grid (BSG) structure [4, 5, 10, 11, 12] or the Sequence Pair (