Slicing floorplan with clustering constraints

In floorplan design it is useful to allow users to specify placement constraints in the final packing. Clustering constraint is one kind of placement constraint in which a given set of modules are restricted to be geometrically adjacent to one another. The wiring cost can be reduced by putting modules with a lot of connections close together. Designers may also need this type of placement constraint to pack the modules according to their functionality. In this paper, a method addressing clustering constraint in slicing floorplan is presented. A linear time algorithm is devised to locate neighboring modules in a normalized Polish expression and re-arrange the modules in order to satisfy the constraints. Experiments were performed on some benchmarks and the results are promising