Zero-deadspace Floorplanning for Soft Modules

Abstract

Floorplanning is an important phase in physical design of VLSI. In this paper, a new efficient heuristic algorithm is presented to handle soft modules: LS (L-Shaped packing) , which is inspired by the game, Tetris®. The LS algorithm generates a zero- deadspace floorplan for a set of soft modules with a very strict aspect ratio constraint. The soft modules are clustered into a zone side by side and placed the zone to the partial floorplan. While attempting to grow from lower-left to upper-right, all the zone are packed to the floorplan. The packing seems to be an iterative L-Shape packing for each pair of zones. The experimental results are base on the standard MCNC and GSRC benchmarks. The resules demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can obtain a significant improvement both in the area and runtime, All the experiments are carried out on an Intel® 2.6 GB machine with 1 GB memory. Particularly, our methodology provides greater improvement over the other approaches. The results of LS on all benchmarks obtain zerodeadspace floorplans, and were completed within 1 second, under a strict aspect ratio of modules such as [0.5, 2]. The area utilization of the proposed model shows the superiority for solution quality, scalability and robustness. Consequently, it is also suitable to handle large scale floorplanning problems.