Constrained floorplanning with whitespace

This paper considers the constrained floorplanning problem in the context of a design scenario where floor-plans are required to contain some white space to facilitate subsequent buffer insertion. An elegant bounded iterative methodology for floorplan-refinement based on the min-cost max-flow formulation of Feng et al augmented by a heuristic area-redistribution algorithm is presented. This approach results in substantially better quality floorplans than previously reported as substantiated by our experimental results.