A Novel Approach for Multilevel Fixed Outline Floorplanning

Multilevel strategy is one of the most popular methods for fixed outline floor planning. It partitions an original circuit into some sub-circuits and then merges them into relatively big ones. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation approach and integrate it into the simulated annealing framework in the merging stage. Moreover, a novel search technique, which can almost keep away from the local optimal, is proposed to obtain better floor plans. Experimental results show that our approach can obtain better performance than the state-of-the-art in terms of runtime, wire length and success rate.