RECTILINEAR SHAPE FORMATION METHOD ON BLOCK PLACEMENT

In the floorplan design problem, soft blocks can take various rectilin ear shapes. The conventional floorplanning methods. however, restrict their shapes only to rectangle. As a result, waste area often remains in the layout. Some floorplanning methods have been developed to handl e rectilinear hard blocks, however, no floorplanning methods have been developed to optimize rectilinear soft blocks. In this paper, we prop ose a floorplanning method which places rectilinear soft blocks. The a dvantages of the method are reducing both waste area and wire length. We present Separate-Rejoin method which efficiently forms rectilinear shapes for soft blocks. The result is obtained quickly because the met hod is based on the slicing structure in spite of handling rectilinear block. Thus. our method is suitable for practical use in terms of lay out area, wire length and processing time. We applied our method to a benchmark example and an industrial data. For the benchmark example, o ur method reduces waste area by 25% and wire length by 13%; in compari son with the conventional rectangular soft block approach.