IMF: interconnect-driven multilevel floorplanning for large-scale building-module designs

Abstract— We present in this paper a new interconnect-driven multilevel floorplanning, called IMF, to handle large-scale building-module designs. Unlike the traditional multilevel framework that adopts the “V-cycle” framework: bottom-up coarsening followed by top-down uncoarsening, in contrast, IMF works in the “Λ-cycle” manner: top-down uncoarsening (partitioning) followed by bottom-up coarsening (merging). The top-down partitioning stage iteratively partitions the floorplan region based on min-cut bipartitioning with exact net-weight modeling to reduce the number of global interconnections and thus the total wirelength. Then, the bottom-up merging stage iteratively applies fixed-outline floorplanning using simulated annealing for all regions and merges two neighboring regions recursively. We also propose an accelerative fixedoutline floorplanning (AFF) to speed up wirelength minimization under the outline constraint. Experimental results show that IMF consistently ob...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Tung-Chieh Chen, Yao-Wen Chang, Shyh-Chang Lin
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 2005, Multilevel Framework, Traditional Multilevel Framework, Λ-cycle Multilevel Framework