Slicing floorplans with boundary constraints

In floorplanning of very large scale integration design, it is useful if users are allowed to specify some placement constraints in the packing. One particular kind of placement constraints is to pack some modules on one of the four sides: on the left, on the right, at the bottom, or at the top of the final floorplan. These are called boundary constraints. In this paper, we enhanced a well-known slicing floorplan algorithm [10] to handle these boundary constraints. Our main contribution is a necessary and sufficient characterization of the Polish expression, a representation of the intermediate solutions in the simulated annealing process, so that we can check these constraints efficiently and can fix the expression in case the constraints are violated. We tested our algorithm on some benchmark data and the performance is good.