Area(number)-balanced hierarchy of staircase channels with minimum crossing nets

We address the problem of hierarchically partitioning a VLSI floorplan F using monotone staircase channels to aid global routing. Our problem is to identify a monotone staircase channel (ms-cut) from one corner of F to its opposite corner, such that (i) the number of nets crossing the ms-cut is minimized, and (ii) the area (or the number of the blocks) of both the partitions are nearly equal. The problem is shown to be NP-hard, and a maxflow-based heuristic is proposed.