The Rectangle Placement Language

Constraint-based symbolic layout of VLSI designs has received growing attention during the past few years. Several systems have been developed which can offer graphical or textual media for the expression of designs and can provide automatic compaction to technology specific design rules. The ability of these systems to allow for the expression of more generalized relationships is a topic open for further research. RPL is a constraint-based symbolic layout language intended to address the problem of providing a more flexible set of constraints and restraints to the designer for expressing the relationships and dependencies of the design. This paper describes some of the ideas behind this work and details some of the progress that has been made.