Slicing floorplans with range constraint

In floorplanning, it is important to allow users to specify placement const raints. Floorplanning with preplaced constraint is considered recently in M urata ct al. (1997) and Young and Wong (1998), In this paper, me address a more general kind of placement constraint called range constraint in which a module must be placed within a given rectangular region in the floorplan. This is a more general formulation of the placement constraint problem and any preplaced constraint can be written as a range constraint. We extend t he Wong-Liu algorithm (1986) to handle range constraint. Our main contribut ion is a novel shape curve computation which takes range constraint into co nsideration. Experimental results show that the extended floorplanner perfo rms very well and, in particular, it out-performs the floorplanner in [13] when specialized to handle preplaced modules.