We present in this paper a multilevel floorplanning/placement framework based on the B*-tree representation, called MB*-tree, to handle the floorplanning and packing for large-scale building modules. The MB*-tree adopts a two-stage technique, clustering followed by declustering. The clustering stage iteratively groups a set of modules based on a cost metric guided by area utilization and module connectivity, and at the same time establishes the geometric relations for the newly clustered modules by constructing a corresponding B*-tree for them. The declustering stage iteratively ungroups a set of the previously clustered modules (i.e., perform tree expansion) and then refines the floorplanning/placement solution by using a simulated annealing scheme. In particular, the MB*-tree preserves the geometric relations among modules during declustering, which makes the MB*-tree an ideal data structure for the multilevel floorplanning/placement framework. Experimental results show that the MB*-tree obtains significantly better silicon area and wirelength than previous works. Further, unlike previous works, MB*-tree scales very well as the circuit size increases.

We present in this paper a multilevel floorplanning/placement framework based on the B*-tree representation, called MB*-tree, to handle the floorplanning and packing for large-scale building modules. The MB*-tree adopts a two-stage technique, clustering followed by declustering. The clustering stage iteratively groups a set of modules based on a cost metric guided by area utilization and module connectivity, and at the same time establishes the geometric relations for the newly clustered modules by constructing a corresponding B*-tree for them. The declustering stage iteratively ungroups a set of the previously clustered modules (i.e., perform tree expansion) and then refines the floorplanning/placement solution by using a simulated annealing scheme. In particular, the MB*-tree preserves the geometric relations among modules during declustering, which makes the MB*-tree an ideal data structure for the multilevel floorplanning/placement framework. Experimental results show that the MB*-tree obtains significantly better silicon area and wirelength than previous works. Further, unlike previous works, MB*-tree scales very well as the circuit size increases.

Floorplanning is an important step in an early phase of VLSI design. For faster design convergence, there is an urgent need to start floorplanning as early as possible, even when not all modules are designed. Therefore, it is desirable to consider floorplanning with uncertainty to obtain a compact and reliable floorplan when the dimensions and interconnections of modules are not fully determined. In this paper, we propose a sequence-pair based floorplanner, named PLP, for uncertain designs. PLP with uncertain data can consider non-slicing floorplans, and then generate reliable and compact floorplans. Experimental results indicate that its performance is equivalent to the conventional sequence-pair floorplanner, however, PLP attains significant higher reliability. With 30%-70% uncertainty, our algorithm achieves at least 80% confidence that the area derivation is within only 1%.

We present in this paper a multilevel floorplanning/placement framework based on the B*-tree representation, called MB*-tree, to handle the floorplanning and packing for large-scale building modules. The MB*-tree adopts a two-stage technique, clustering followed by declustering. The clustering stage iteratively groups a set of modules based on a cost metric guided by area utilization and module connectivity, and at the same time establishes the geometric relations for the newly clustered modules by constructing a corresponding B*-tree for them. The declustering stage iteratively ungroups a set of the previously clustered modules (i.e., perform tree expansion) and then refines the floorplanning/placement solution by using a simulated annealing scheme. In particular, the MB*-tree preserves the geometric relations among modules during declustering, which makes the MB*-tree an ideal data structure for the multilevel floorplanning/placement framework. Experimental results show that the MB*-tree obtains significantly better silicon area and wirelength than previous works. Further, unlike previous works, MB*-tree scales very well as the circuit size increases.