Minimum area in wheels [VLSI floorplanning]

Solving the floorplan area optimization problem can be extremely hard, even unworkable. Our contribution, a new algorithm called AWO, is described in this paper. It is focused on wheels, or order five floorplans, and the technique employed consists in eliminating all possibly generated redundant and invalid implementations of blocks with wasted areas, previous to each phase of design. Benchmarks used to analyze the performance of existing algorithms show that AWO leads to the final implementations of the wheel in a shorter time and that it is capable of handling more complex non-slicing floorplans, as it demands less memory.