1. An Effective Floorplanning Algorithm in Mixed Mode Placement Integrated with Rectilinear- Shaped Optimization for Soft Blocks Changqi Yang, Xianlong Hong, Hannah Yang EDA Lab, Tsinghua University Strategic CAD Labs, Intel Corporation

2. Content Motivation Outline of the Floorplan Algorithm RSF Experimental Results Summary

3. Mixed Mode Placement Mixed Mode Placement (MMP) problem can be successfully solved by combining floorplanning and cell based placement according to circuit's hierarchy. Motivation – Partition – Floorplan – Placement

4. Floorplanning is the Key Stage in MMP Floorplanning is the key phase during the whole design stages of MMP because the shorter wire length of floorplanning can reduce the final wire length after global / detailed placement. Restricting virtual blocks’ shapes to be fixed or be rectangular will limit the quality of floorplanning. Motivation

5. Previous Works Soften virtual blocks by changing their width and height – 2000, Ma, “VLSI floorplanning with Fixed Topology” L/T shaped floorplanning – 2001, Ma, "Floorplanning with Abutment Constraints..." Grid-based floorplanning algorithm to optimize the shape of virtual blocks – 2000, Dinesh P. Mehta, "On the Use of Flexible,..." Lagrange Relaxation method to modify the shapes and dimensions of modules to fill up the unused area of a preliminary floorplanning – 2002, F.Y.Young, "Non-rectangular shaping and sizing..." Motivation

6. Virtual Block Virtual blocks are composed by standard cells. Virtual blocks’ features: – They can expand their area – They can be transformed into rectilinear-shape. – They connect to other blocks through virtual pins. Motivation

7. Main Flow Outline of Algorithm

8. RSO MBB - Minimal Bounding Box – The half-perimeter of this bounding box is corresponding to the minimal wire length of the net in half-perimeter mode MBBI – Minimal Bounding Box Intersection – The virtual pin can be allocated at the point of intersection between the MBB and the virtual block which the virtual pin belongs to DSA – Dead Space Attachment – RSO can reduce the wire length if it can result in the smaller MBB of nets. It starts from searching DSB during the packing and then attaches the DSB to the virtual blocks properly. Outline of Algorithm

9. MBB & MBBI The minimal wire length of a net is: Draw a MMB according to the formula MBB would retrogress to be a line Find MBB with rectilinear-shaped block by enumerating all MBB candidates among sub blocks and selecting the one with minimal perimeter. Outline of Algorithm

10. Find the Dead Space CBL is adopted as the representation of blocks’ topology. In CBL, all the dead-space blocks can be found during the process of packing. Outline of Algorithm

11. DSA Gain: Potential Gain: Outline of Algorithm

12. DSA Algorithm Algorithm DSA() DS: the set of DSB in packing { construct DS during packing according to lemma 3; for each D in DS do for each attachment do calculate G according to formula (2); calculate G ' according to formula (3); end for select an attachment A with maximal G; if G(A)>0 then complete this attachment; else select an attachment A with maximal G ' ; if G ' (A) > 0 then complete this attachment; end if end for } Outline of Algorithm

13. Results on MCNC Cases Experimental Results Name WireLen Min/Ave r Virtual # 20% Virtual #50% Virtual #100% Min/AverImpr (%)Min/AverImpr (%)Min/AverImpr (%) ami33 39.431/ 48.947 38.189/ 40.657 3.2/ 16.9 32.427/ 33.781 17.8/ 30.9 19.911/ 22.903 49.5/ 53.2 ami49 710.220/ 775.551 730.156/ 757.099 -2.8/ 2.4 667.203/ 689.463 6.1/ 11.1 444.975/ 480.984 37.3/ 37.9 apte 194.950/ 202.830 160.227/ 209.284 17.8/ -3.2 160.68/ 177.243 17.6/ 12.6 74.187/ 113.626 61.9/ 43.9 xerox 403.466/ 533.916 347.719/ 411.925 13.8/ 22.8 303.507/ 365.3 24.8/ 31.6 192.323/ 237.822 52.3/ 55.5

14. Results on MMP Circuits#cells #macro blocks #nets Block area (average) /cell area(average) block270942100492045 block65996610049872 block85662810049695 block95895910049751 block1051511010049676 Experimental Results

15. Results on MMP (2) Name HMMP WireLen MMP WireLen Impr( %) HMMP RTime(s) MMP RTime(s) block 21.692e61.608e65.0358320 block 62.029e61.435e629.3382335 block 82.022e61.409e630.3405314 block92.345e61.552e633.8388295 block 102.131e61.240e641.8388356 Experimental Results

16. Summary The floorplanning algorithm integrated with rectilinear-shaped optimization is effective. It can achieve good floorplanning quality when virtual blocks exist. The MMP involving the algorithm as its floorplanning stage can obtain better performance in final placement results Summary

17. Thank you!!!