AbstractAlthough the bounded sliceline grid (BSG) is an effective data structure for treating rectangular placement, it needs to deal with more complicated rectilinear figures such as L‐ or T‐shaped figures in its applications to VLSI layouts. A number of studies have been conducted regarding this problem, but the methods considered in these studies not only have not considered representation of the optimal placement of complicated rectilinear figures but also have not generated permissible neighboring solutions, and searching optimal solutions by search schemes based on these methods is difficult. In order to resolve this problem, this paper proposes multilayered parametric BSG and a placement algorithm using the multilayered parametric BSG. Multilayering allows descriptions representing conditions for nonoverlapping of rectilinear figures simultaneously with constraints of each layer. Parameterization allows multiple solutions represented by the BSG. The proposed method represents complicated rectilinear figures as combinations of a number of element rectangles. When a figure (core cell) with the element rectangles having common parts is the input, it gives the conditions of the multilayered parametric BSG guaranteeing the possibility of generating an optimal solution in terms of the surface area. The practicability of the idea of the proposed method has been verified by testing with several tens of figure inputs by implementing an optimal solution search algorithm based on simulated annealing based on the proposed data structure. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(7): 66–78, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.10079