Trees, slices and wheels: on the floorplan area minimization problem

Authors

Abstract

Hierarchical approaches to floorplan design usually use trees to represent hierarchical floorplans, defining topological relations between a set of components to be placed on a (circuit) board. This placement is then optimized to minimize chip area, perimeter, or other such cost measurements. This work places the problem of minimizing hierarchical floorplans of order k within the appropriate theoretical framework and presents an algorithm that uses exclusively the k-ary representation tree to determine the best or minimal solution to a conflicting bicriteria problem. The algorithm does not need predefined partitioning schemes and determines the orientation of each individual component. It can deal both with five-module wheels, as well as slices, and can handle an arbitrary number of realizations for each individual component.

Keywords

Multicriteria problem; K-ary trees, nondomination; floorplan optimization

Subject

Floorplan optimization

Journal

Networks, Vol. 41, #4, pp. 235-244, Wiley InterScience, May 2003

DOI