Simultaneous Floorplanning and Binding: A Probabilistic Approach

In this work we present a probabilistic approach to simultaneous floorplanning and resource binding for low power. Traditional approaches iteratively perform floorplanning and resource binding while using crude deterministic wire-length estimates like bounding box (since we do not have routing information for inter module interconnect). Nonavailability of accurate wire-length results in suboptimal design and failure of timing closure. In this work we model the wire-lengths as probability distributions and propose a novel probabilistic optimization methodology. Experimental results using state of the art commercial and academic tools were conducted. The novelty in this work is in the higher chance of ending with a feasible design that is synthesizable without losing in overall power (interconnect + module + register). Experimental results show that on-average the number of unsynthesized modules after routing for Mediabench benchmarks were 2 in the conventional case, while on average our probabilistic approach had all modules synthesized after routing.