A Bounded 2D Contour Searching Algorithm for Floorplan Design with Arbitrarily Shaped Rectilinear and Soft Modules

In this paper, we present a novel floorplanning algorithm to optimize the floorplan with arbitrarily shaped rectilinear and soft blocks. The floorplan quality of this algorithm is demonstrated by randomly generated artificial examples and a real industrial example. The experimental results on the randomly generated cases demonstrate that the algorithm can find a floorplan with average area utilization 91.8% for cases ranging from 4 to 1600 blocks. The test results on industrial examples demonstrate that this algorithm can potentially be used to generate high quality floorplans for a wide range of design styles (pure custom blocks, gate array, standard cells, mixed mode cases, etc.)