Bounded 2D contour searching algorithm for floorplan design with arbitrary shaped rectilinear and soft modules

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel floor planning algorithm to optimize the floor plan with a arbitrarily shaped rectilinear and soft blocks. The floor plan quality of this algorithm is demonstrated by randomly generated artificial examples and a real industrial example. The experimental results on the randomly generated cases demonstrate that the algorithm can find a floor plan with average area utilization 91. 8% for cases ranging from 4 to 1600 blocks. The test results on industrial example demonstrate that this algorithm can potentially be used to generate high quality floor plans for a wide range of design styles (pure custom blocks, gate array, standard cells, mixed mode cases etc. )