Fast floorplanning for effective prediction and construction

Floorplanning is a crucial phase in VLSI Physical Design. The subsequent placement and routing of the cells/modules are coupled very closely with the quality of the floorplan. A widely used technique for floorplanning is Simulated Annealing. It gives very good floorplanning results but has major limitation in terms of running time. For more than tens of modules Simulated Annealing is not practical. Floorplanning forms the core of many synthesis applications. Designers need faster prediction of system metrics to quickly evaluate the effects of design changes. Early prediction of metrics is imperative for estimating timing and routability. In this work we propose a constructive technique for predicting floorplan metrics. We show how to modify the existing top-down partitioning based floorplanning to obtain a fast and accurate floorplan prediction. The prediction gets better as number of modules and flexibility in their shapes increases. We also explore the applicability of traditional Sizing Theorem when combining two modules based on their sizes and interconnecting wirelength. Experimental results show that our prediction algorithm can predict the area/length cost function normally within 5-10% of the results obtained by Simulated Annealing and is, on the average, thousand times faster.