PeF: Poisson’s Equation-Based Large-Scale Fixed-Outline Floorplanning

Floorplanning is the first stage of VLSI physical design. An effective floorplanning engine definitely has a positive impact on chip design speed, quality, and performance. In this article, we present a novel mathematical model to characterize nonoverlapping of modules, and propose a flat fixed-outline floorplanning algorithm based on the VLSI global placement approach using Poisson’s equation. The algorithm consists of global floorplanning and legalization phases. In global floorplanning, we redefine the potential energy of each module based on the novel mathematical model for characterizing nonoverlapping of modules and an analytical solution of Poisson’s equation. In this scheme, the widths of soft modules appear as variables in the energy function and can be optimized. Moreover, we design a fast approximate computation scheme for partial derivatives of the potential energy. In legalization, based on the defined horizontal and vertical constraint graphs, we eliminate overlaps between modules remained after global floorplanning, by modifying relative positions of modules. Experiments on the MCNC, GSRC, HB+, and ami49_x benchmarks show that, our algorithm improves the average wirelength by at least 2% and 5% on small and large-scale benchmarks with certain whitespace, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art floorplanners.