Slicing floorplans with boundary constraints

In floorplanning of very large scale integration design, it is useful if us ers are allowed to specify some placement constraints in the packing. One p articular kind of placement constraints is to pack some modules on one of t he four sides: on the left, on the right, at the bottom, or at the top of t he final floorplan, These are called boundary constraints. In this paper, w e enhanced a well-known slicing floorplan algorithm [10] to handle these bo undary constraints. Our main contribution is a necessary and sufficient cha racterization of the Polish expression, a representation of the intermediat e solutions in the simulated annealing process, so that we can check these constraints efficiently and can fis the expression in case the constraints are violated. We tested our algorithm on some benchmark data and the perfor mance is good.