Slicing floorplans with range constraint

In floorplanning, it is important to allow users to specify placement constraints. Floorplanning with pre-placed constraint is considered recently in [3, 13]. In this paper, we address a more general placement constraint called range constraint, in which a module must be placed within a given rectangular region in the floorplan. This is a more general formulation because any pre-placed constraint can be written as a range constraint. We extend the Wong-Liu algorithm to handle range constraint. Our main contribution is a novel shape curve computation which takes range constraint into consideration. Experimental results show that the extended floorplanner performs very well and, in particular, it out-performs the floorplanner in [13] when specialized to handle pre-placed modules.