Fast floorplanning for effective prediction and construction

Abstract

Floorplanning is a crucial phase in VLSI physical design. The subsequent placement and routing of the cells/modules are coupled very closely with the quality of the floorplan. A widely used technique for floorplanning is simulated annealing. It gives very good floorplanning results but has major limitation in terms of run time. For circuit sizes exceeding tens of modules simulated annealing is not practical. Floorplanning forms the core of many synthesis applications. Designers need faster prediction of system metrics to quickly evaluate the effects of design changes. Early prediction of metrics is imperative for estimating timing and routability. In this work we propose a constructive technique for predicting floorplan metrics. We show how to modify the existing top-down partitioning-based floorplanning to obtain a fast and accurate floorplan prediction. The prediction gets better as the number of modules and flexibility in the shapes increase. We also explore applicability of the traditional sizing theorem when combining two modules based on their sizes and interconnecting wirelength. Experimental results show that our prediction algorithm can predict the area/length cost function normally within 5-10% of the results obtained by simulated annealing and is, on average, 1000 times faster.