Flute - A Floorplanning Agent for Full Custom VLSI Design

Flute is a heuristic floorplanner that operates as one of the agents of the Cadre - a system of cooperating expert agents for converting a hierarchical structural description into full custom VLSI layout. Flute is modeled on the human floorplanning process and uses a mixture of rule-based programming, state control and algorithmic operators. Initially, a topological plan is generated by placing modules on a grid graph. From this plan, a constraint graph is prepared. This graph is solved in order to add geometric size and placement information to the floorplan.