Efficient nonrectangular shaped voltage island aware floorplanning with nonrandomized searching engine

Multi-supply voltage (MSV) technique is one of the efficient ways to reduce power consumption. However, MSV makes the physical design much more complicated. Especially, the randomized algorithm consumes much time as the size of the problem increases and the constraint of rectangular shaped voltage island limits better solutions in terms of power. In this paper, a nonrectangular shaped voltage island (NSVI) aware floorplanning is proposed with nonrandomized searching engine for efficient floorplanning. With a generalized slicing tree, a hypergraph is generated according to the cores' legal voltage levels, which is favorable to cluster cores working under the same voltage level together so that the called NSVIs can be generated easily. The proposed approach can deal with the fixed-outline floorplanning and perform well under different aspect ratios. Experimental results on GSRC benchmark suites indicate that the proposed method can obtain better solutions with less CPU time than published methods.