ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the latest trends in floorplanning problem formulations and discusses fixed-outline floorplanning. It explores statistical floorplanning and floorplanning for manufacturability. The chapter describes several approaches for considering interconnect planning during floorplanning. It also discusses floorplanning for specialized architectures such as field programmable gate arrays and analog integrated circuits. The fixed-outline model is considered to be more realistic because floorplanning is only carried out after the die size and the package have been chosen in most design methodologies. Classical floorplanning has mostly used rectangular modules and sometimes other simple shapes such as L- and T-shapes. Minimizing area has traditionally been a key objective of floorplanning. The whole point of floorplanning is to find suitable locations for modules and so it would seem that this information would be unknown at the start of the process. The resistance in power wires is increasing substantially.
