An Analytical Approach to Incremental Floorplanning

Incremental modification and optimization is of crucial importance in order to cope with the complex design with the merging of VLSI design phases and facilitate concurrent optimization. To handle the incremental floorplanning efficiently, we propose an analytical method in this paper based on a mixed integer linear programming model. Our method supports incremental changes on an existing floorplan and can find an optimal solution with some design constraints. Different with traditional heuristic methods, our algorithm can incorporate metrics into mixed linear programming constraints conveniently and easily. Experiments on MCNC benchmarks show the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, our method can also provide other tools with good physical estimates and other performance guidelines.