A fixed-outline floorplanning method

In this paper, we propose a stable fixed-outline floorplanning method (IARFP). An elaborated method for perturbing solutions, Insertion after Remove (IAR), is devised for the simulated annealing. The IAR operation uses the technique of enumerating positions in Sequence Pair and greatly accelerates the searching. Moreover, based on the analysis of diverse objective functions used in the existing researches, we suggest a new objective function, which is still effective when combined with other objectives, for the fixed-outline floorplanning. Compared with the previous fixed-outline floorplanners, the proposed method is effective and efficient. Experiments showed that the proposed fixed-outline floorplanner achieved 100% success rate efficiently when optimizing area and wire-length simultaneously, while getting much smaller wire-length. On the other hand, we validated once more by experiments that aspect ratio close to one is beneficial to wire-length.