Module Placement On Arbitrarily Rectilinear Regions Using Less Flexibility First Principles

Module placement in a rectilinear area is one of the most important problems in IC/PCB design, A deterministic algorithm for VLSI block placement in a rectilinear area was developed in this paper through human's accumulated experience in solving "packing" problem. Rectangle packing problem is just a simplified case of the polygon-shape stone plate packing problem that the ancient masons needed to face. Several "packing" principles derived from the so-called "less flexibility first" experience of the masons. A k-d tree data structure is used for manipulating the packed rectangles under the derived packing principles, Experiment results demonstrate that the algorithm is effective and promising in rectilinear area placement application.