FAST ALGORITHMS FOR THERMAL-AWARE FLOORPLANNING

摘要

Thermal-aware floorplanning is an effective way to solve the thermal problem in modern integrated circuit (IC) designs. Existing thermal-aware floorplanning methods are all based on simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithms (GAs) or linear programming (LP), which are quite time-consuming. In this paper, we propose two fast algorithms for thermal-aware floor-planning, a greedy algorithm based on the less-flexibility-first (LFF) principle and a hybrid algorithm combining the greedy algorithm and an SA-based refinement. The greedy algorithm can fast obtain a locally optimized floorplan with reduced area and temperature. The hybrid method can get similar results compared with pure SA-based approaches but it is still much faster.