Exploring adjacency in floorplanning

This paper describes a new floorplanning approach called constrained adjacency graph (CAG) that helps exploring adjacency in floorplans. CAG extends the previous adjacency graph approaches by adding explicit adjacency constraints to the graph edges. After sufficient and necessary conditions of CAG are developed based on dissected floorplans, CAG is extended to handle general floorplans in order to improve area without changing the adjacency relations dramatically. These characteristics are currently utilized in a randomized greedy improvement heuristic for wire length optimization. The results show that better floorplans are found with much less running time for problems with 100 to 300 modules in comparison to a simulated annealing floorplanner based on sequence pairs.