CELL DESIGNER - AN AUTOMATIC PLACEMENT AND ROUTING TOOL FOR THE MIXED DESIGN OF MACRO AND STANDARD CELLS

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the problem of floorplanning of the mixed design of macro and standard cells. The proposed algorithm which is based on partitioning and slicing approach, uses a modified min-cut bipartitioning heuristic, The heuristic bipartitions a block of a mixture of macro and standard cells to minimize the netcut, which are the number of nets connecting both sub-blocks, with size constraints. A sub-block is a resulting descendant block. Before starting the bipartitioning of the block, the macro cell with the longest side in the block is selected first. Using edges of the selected macro cell, bipartitionings are performed twice fixing the location of the macro cell on one of 4 corners of the block with its rotation and reflection. Bipartitioning of blocks is repeated until each block has either a macro cell or standard cells without macro cells. As a result of bipartitioning, a slicing tree is constructed. Using the proposed floorplan algorithm, we developed an automatic placement and routing tool, Cell Designer, for the mixed design of macro and standard cells. According to the floorplanner, macro cells are placed and standard cells are grouped into standard cell blocks. Standard cells are placed and routed within estimated area of block using conventional tools. They form a fixed-shaped block like a macro cell. Interconnections between the two adjacent blocks are performed with a conventional channel router. The channels and the order of channel routing are determined following the hierarchy of the slicing tree. Cell Designer has a dedicated graphics editor to provide interactive services to users. Experimental results on well-known benchmark data are shown.