Floor Planning and Global Routing in an Automated Chip Design System

In this thesis, a systematic approach has been taken to generating either a slicing or non-slicing structure floorplan. For non-slicing structure layout, the system is divided into initial placement, initial floorplan construction and a floorplan packing. A new analytical model is introduced for the initial placement. Unlike previous analytical methods in which modules are modeled as points, the area of each module as well as its interconnections are considered in the objective function. An energy function is defined between any two modules and the objective is to minimize the total energy. A new module packing algorithm is introduced. A novel feature of the algorithm is that modules are shifted back to obtain the maximal slack region for modules. The slack region provides useful information for reducing the critical path of the chip. For the slicing structure approach, after the initial placement, slicing and slicing structure optimization are performed. Slicing is used to obtain a slicing structure topology for the modules. It recursively bisects the initial placement result according to the area distribution. Slicing structure optimization is used to determine an optimal shape for all the modules, given the chip aspect ratio constraints. These algorithms are integrated and linked by a common database and are driven by a main program using hierarchical graphic menu entries. Experimental results show that the non-slicing structure approach achieves better area utilization and shorter wiring length than the slicing structure floorplan methodology, especially when the number of fixed-shaped modules is large.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Hsu, Yu-Chin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kubitz, William,

• Computer Science

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8803071

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69580