With the recent advent of deep submicron technology and new packing schemes, the components in the integrated circuit are often not rectangular. On the basis of the representation of Corner Block List (CBL), we propose a new method of handling rectilinear blocks. In this paper, the handling of the rectilinear blocks is simplified by transforming the L/T- shaped block problem into the Mign-abutment constraint problem. We devise the block rejoining process and block alignment operation for forming the L/T-shaped blocks into their original configurations. The shape flexibility of the soft blocks, and the rotation and reflection of L/T-shaped blocks are exploited to obtain a tight packing. The empty rooms are introduced to the process of block rejoining. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by the experimental results on a set of some benchmark examples.
We present a novel incremental algorithm for non-slicing floorplans based on the corner block list representation. The horizontal and vertical adjacency graphs are derived from the packing of the initial floorplanning results. Based on the critical path and the accumulated slack distances we define,we choose the best position for insertion and do a series of operations incrementally, such as deleting modules, adding modules, and resizing modules quickly. This incremental floorplanning algorithm has a very high speed less than 1μm,which is one of the most important measures in this research. The algorithm preserves the original good performances on area and wire length. It can also supply other tools with good physical estimates for area, wire length, and other performance guidelines.