TCG-based multi-bend bus driven floorplanning

In this paper, the problem of bus driven floor-planning is addressed. Given a set of modules and bus specifications, a floorplan solution including the bus routes will be generated with the floorplan area and total bus area minimized. Some previous works have addressed this problem with restricted bus shapes of 0-bend, 1-bend or 2-bend (Law, 2005). However, in this paper, we address this bus driven floorplanning without any limitations on the shapes of the buses. We solve this problem by a simulated annealing based floorplanner using the transitive closure graph (TCG) representation (Lin, 2001). Experimental results show that we can improve over (Law, 2005) significantly in terms of both run time and quality, since there are more flexibilities in routing the buses and complex shape validation steps are not needed. For data sets with buses connecting a large number of blocks, our approach can still generate high quality solutions effectively, while the approach (Law, 2005) of restricting to 2-bend buses often cannot give any feasible solutions.