Configurable Multi-product Floorplanning

Before VLSI design starts, it is strategically important to do product planning for targeted market segments that need specific applications, and to optimally reuse at different levels to save design and silicon costs with shorter time-to-market schedule. Conventional ASIC or SoC design floorplan usually targets for one single product; and, high efforts in re-floorplan and re-convergence for different products are still required if there is no pre-design stage multi-product planning. Therefore, the problem of designing floorplans at product or market planning stage that simultaneously optimizes multiple products, or multi-product floorplanning, is introduced. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in literature that addresses this newly emerged and financially important problem. We start with the necessary number of basic functional blocks to accommodate all the products, and pack them using a simulated annealing (SA) based floorplanner that can easily incorporate other costs (e.g., product finance weights). Given a candidate floorplan, we provide both an O(n³) exact algorithm and a O(n) greedy heuristic to identify the minimum feasible region for each product, where n is the number of basic blocks in this floorplan. These identification procedures are integrated into the SA framework to generate a floorplan that favors the configurable multi-product design. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by promising results on several data sets derived from industrial test cases.