On extending slicing floorplan to handle L/T-shaped modules and abutment constraints

In floorplanning, it is common that a designer wants to have certain module s abutting with one another in the final packing. The problem of controllin g the relative positions of an arbitrary number of modules in floorplan des ign is nontrivial, Slicing floorplan has an advantageous Feature in which t he topological structure of the packing can be found without knowing the mo dule dimensions. This feature is good for handling placement constraints in general. In this paper, we make use of it to solve the abutment problem in the presence of L- and T-shaped modules. This is done by a procedure which explores the topological structure of the packing and Ends the neighborhoo d relationship between every pair of modules in linear time, Our main contr ibution is a method that can handle abutment constraints in the presence of L- or T-shaped modules in such a way that the shape flexibility of the sof t modules can still be fully exploited to obtain a tight packing. We tested our floorplanner with some benchmark data and the results are promising.