F-FM: Fixed-outline floorplanning methodology for mixed-size modules considering voltage-island constraint

This paper presents a two-stage approach to handle fixed-outline floorplanning for mixed size modules, named F-FM. F-FM combines the advantages of the analytical approach and the slicing tree representation. Thus, it is not only suitable for handling fixed-outline floorplanning but also can be extended to handle other important issues in floorplanning such as routability or thermal effect in addition to wirelength. Recently, low power has become big challenges in very large-scale integration designs, which makes voltage-island driven floorplanning more important than ever. Although the problem has been discussed by previous works, no paper considers signal wirelength, powerplanning, and voltage drop at the same time under the fixed-outline constraint. Thus, this paper extends F-FM to handle this problem and consider these issues by properly dividing modules in a voltage domain into several islands. The experimental results show our approach obtains the best results in these problems.