Floorplanning challenges in early chip planning

Early chip planning is becoming more critical as server system designers strive to explore a large design space with multiple cores and accelerators in an advanced silicon technology that includes 3D chip stacking. During early chip planning, designers search for the high-level design and layout that best satisfies a myriad of constraints and targets. In this paper, we discuss our experience in applying traditional floorplanning tools at this early stage and suggest how they might be adapted for early floorplanning.