An analytical method for optimal module orientation

An important step in VLSI physical design is to determine the orientation of the modules after floorplanning. The authors describe an analytical method to determine the optimal module orientation in terms of estimated total wire length. The present formulation requires only the solution of set of linear equations to obtain a close approximation to the optimal solution. Thus, the computation speed is very high. Several variations of this method are also presented. The method was implemented and tested on a large number of examples. The results indicate that the method is very competitive in comparison with methods such as hill-climbing and simulated annealing in terms of the quality of the results and computation time.<>