16.5  Summary

Floorplanning follows the system partitioning step and is the first step in arranging circuit blocks on an ASIC. There are many factors to be considered during floorplanning: minimizing connection length and signal delay between blocks; arranging fixed blocks and reshaping flexible blocks to occupy the minimum die area; organizing the interconnect areas between blocks; planning the power, clock, and I/O distribution. The handling of some of these factors may be automated using CAD tools, but many still need to be dealt with by hand. Placement follows the floorplanning step and is more automated. It consists of organizing an array of logic cells within a flexible block. The criterion for optimization may be minimum interconnect area, minimum total interconnect length, or performance. There are two main types of placement algorithms: based on min-cut or eigenvector methods. Because interconnect delay in a submicron CMOS process dominates logic-cell delay, planning of interconnect will become more and more important. Instead of completing synthesis before starting floorplanning and placement, we will have to use synthesis and floorplanning/placement tools together to achieve an accurate estimate of timing.

The key points of this chapter are:

• Interconnect delay now dominates gate delay.
• Floorplanning is a mapping between logical and physical design.
• Floorplanning is the center of ASIC design operations for all types of ASIC.
• Timing-driven floorplanning is becoming an essential ASIC design tool.
• Placement is now an automated function.

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