Floorplanning with soft rectilinear blocks using corner block list

In this paper, we propose a CBL-based floorplanning algorithm to handle arbitrary soft rectilinear blocks. The rectilinear blocks are efficiently handled by an obstacle-based method and a replace-upon-overlap mechanism. Compared with previous methods, our algorithm has two major advantages. 1) Efficiency: it can obtain a fast convergence to a sub-optimal solution when combined with simulated annealing; and 2) Generality: it can efficiently handle soft rectilinear blocks as well as hard rectilinear blocks. We have tested our algorithm on several modified MCNC benchmarks, and the experimental results show that our approach is quite promising.