On extending slicing floorplan to handle L/T-shaped modules and abutment constraints

In floorplanning, it is common that a designer wants to have certain modules abutting with one another in the final packing. The problem of controlling the relative positions of an arbitrary number of modules in floorplan design is nontrivial. Slicing floorplan has an advantageous feature in which the topological structure of the packing can be found without knowing the module dimensions. This feature is good for handling placement constraints in general. In this paper, we make use of it to solve the abutment problem in the presence of L- and T-shaped modules. This is done by a procedure which explores the topological structure of the packing and finds the neighborhood relationship between every pair of modules in linear time. Our main contribution is a method that can handle abutment constraints in the presence of L- or T-shaped modules in such a way that the shape flexibility of the soft modules can still be fully exploited to obtain a tight packing. We tested our floorplanner with some benchmark data and the results are promising.