Hierarchical partitioning of VLSI floorplans by staircases

STAIRoute: Global routing using monotone staircase channels

“…In this section, we briefly review monotone staircase channels and the birpartitioning framework in order to obtain them immediately after the floorplan stage. Methods for top-down hierarchical monotone staircase bipartitioning of VLSI floorplans, both in Area-balanced and Number-balanced bipartition appear in [5,7,9,12,13]. Area-balanced bipartition is employed when the area of the blocks in a given floorplan have significant variance, whereas Number-balanced bipartition is applicable for negligible variance in the area of the blocks.…”

“…Area-balanced bipartition is employed when the area of the blocks in a given floorplan have significant variance, whereas Number-balanced bipartition is applicable for negligible variance in the area of the blocks. In [12,13], the balanced bipartitioner used iterative max-flow based [23] min-cut algorithm and thereby incurred higher time complexity at each level of the hierarchy. In [5], emphasis has been given to the hierarchical number balanced monotone staircase bipartitioning using depth-first traversal method in linear time at a given level of the hierarchy.…”

Exploring the Scope of Unconstrained Via Minimization by Recursive Floorplan Bipartitioning

“…Moreover, vias consume substantial routing area and pose as additional routing blockages in the routing regions impacting routability of the design. erefore, via minimization [31] 31], and (b) New [15] Recently, an early global routing (EGR) method STAIRoute [15] was proposed for early routability assessment of a floorplanned layout, facilitated by a monotone staircase cut based recursive floorplan bipartitioning framework [18,25,26]. ese bipartitioners work on any floorplan irrespective of their sliceability.…”

“…It also includes a recent floorplan based early global routability assessment tool STAIRoute [15].is work addresses an early version of unconstrained via minimization problem during early global routing by identifying a set of minimal bend routing regions in any floorplan, by a new recursive bipartitioning framework. ese regions facilitate monotone pa ern routing of a set of nets in the floorplan by STAIRoute.e area/number balanced floorplan bipartitionining is a multi-objective optimization problem and known to be NP-hard [25]. No existing approaches considered bend minimization as an objective and some of them incurred higher runtime overhead.…”

“…e area/number balanced floorplan bipartitionining is a multi-objective optimization problem and known to be NP-hard [25]. No existing approaches considered bend minimization as an objective and some of them incurred higher runtime overhead.…”