EE 582 (Physical Design Automation of VLSI Circuits and Systems)

Assignment 4

In this assignment, you will solve a few floorplanning problems using a linear programming solver.

Go to the lp_solve website and download a proper one (version 5.5.2.0. If you are a window user, download lp_solve_5.5.2.0_IDE_Setup.exe).

Install or compile it.

1. Floorplanning of non-rotatable hard blocks.

The following shows a list of blocks with their dimensions (width and height).

Formulate it into a linear programming problem and solve it (minimize the floorplan area).

• Five hard blocks (width, height).

• B1 (2, 4)

• B2 (5, 4)

• B3 (3, 3)

• B4 (4, 4)

• B5 (2, 3)

What to submit

• Linear programming formulation

• Final floorplan (figure)

2. Floorplanning of rotatable hard blocks.

Use the same five blocks listed above. All of them are rotatable.

Formulate it into a linear programming problem and solve it (minimize the floorplan area).

What to submit

• Linear programming formulation

• Final floorplan (figure)

3. Floorplanning of soft blocks.

Use the same five blocks listed above. All of them are soft. Aspect ratio (height/width) = [0.7, 1.4]

Formulate it into a linear programming problem and solve it (minimize the floorplan area).

What to submit

• Linear programming formulation

• Final floorplan (figure)

4. Floorplanning of more complex benchmarks

Download the following file.

• wget http://eecs.wsu.edu/~daehyun/teaching/2014_EE582/assignments/a04.tar.gz

Unzip it.

• tar xvfz a04.tar.gz

You will see five benchmark files (.ilp).

The following explains the format of the files. (All the hard blocks are rotatable)

• hard - # blocks

• width 1, height 1

• width 2, height 2

• ...

• soft - # blocks

• area 1, aspect ratio 1 (min), aspect ratio 1 (max)

• area 2, aspect ratio 2 (min), aspect ratio 2 (max)

• ...

Make a program to automatically construct a linear programming formulation for a given input file.

Run it to generate a linear programming formulation file for each benchmark.

Use lp_solve to solve the problem.

What to submit

• Final floorplan dimensions (width and height) for each benchmark

• Source code