A GA-based Floorplanning method for Topological Constraint

  • Published : 2005.06.02

Abstract

The floorplanning problem is an essential design step in VLSI layout design and it is how to place rectangular modules as density as possible. And then, as the DSM advances, the VLSI chip becomes more congested even though more metal layers are used for routing. Usually, a VLSI chip includes several buses. As design increases in complexity, bus routing becomes a heavy task. To ease bus routing and avoid unnecessary iterations in physical design, we need to consider bus planning in early floorplanning stage. In this paper, we propose a floorplanning method for topological constraint consisting of bus constraint and memory constraint. The proposed algorithms based on Genetic Algorithm(GA) is adopted a sequence pair. For selection control, new objective functions are introduced for topological constraint. Studies on floor planning and cell placement have been reported as being applications of GA to the LSI layout problem. However, no studies have ever seen the effect of applying GA in consideration of topological constraint. Experimental results show improvement of bus and memory constraint.

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