An interactive/automatic floor planner for hierarchically designed cell based VLSIs

A floor planner suitable for hierarchically designed cell-based VLSIs to achieve an optimum layout design is described. The proposed floor planner has two novel features: the first is the combination of both manual manipulation in floor planning and automatic floor planning in order to make the best use of each method, considering the interdependence of these two methods. The second is the introduction of a novel concept to handle the hierarchical structure of a design in the floor planning stage. The floor planner used the simulated annealing algorithm in the heuristic of the iterative improvement stage of the automatic floor planning