A hierarchical plcement method for building block layout design

빌딩블록의 레이아웃 설계를 위한 계층적 배치 방법

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to solve the problem of placement of rectangular blocks whose sizes and shpaes are pre-determined. The proposed method solves the placement of many retangular blocks of different sizes and shapes in a hierarchical manner, so as to minimize the chip area. The placement problem is divided into several sub-problems: hierarchical partioning, hierarchical area/shape estimation, hierarchical pattern pacement, overlap removal, and module rotation. After the circuit is recursively partitioned to build a hierarchy tree, the necessary wiring area and module shpaes are estimated using the resutls of the partitioning and the pin information before the placement is performed. The placement templaes are defined to represent the relative positions of the modules. The area and the connectivity are optimized separately at each level of hierachy using the placement templates, so the minimization of chip area and wire length can be achieved in a short execution time. Experiments are made on the MCNC building block benchmark circuits and the results are compared with those of other published methods. The proposed technique is shown to produce good figures in tems of execution time and chip area.