On the use of flexible, rectilinear blocks to obtain minimum-area floorplans in mixed block and cell designs

Abstract

This paper presents three minimum-area floorplanning algorithms that use flexible arbitrary rectilinear shapes for the standard cell regions in MBC design. The first algorithm (pure HCST) introduces a grid traversal technique which guarantees a minimum-area floorplan. The second algorithm (Hybrid-BF) uses a combination of HCST and Breadth First (BF) traversals to give a practical solution that approximately places flexible blocks at specified locations calledseeds. The third algorithm (Hybrid-MBF) improves on the shapes of the flexible blocks generated by Hybrid-BF by using a combination of HCST and a Modified Breadth First (MBF) traversal. All three algorithms are polynomial in the number of grid squares. Optimized implementations of Hybrid-BF and Hybrid-MBF required less than two seconds on a SUN SPARCstation 10.