In this paper, the problem of bus-driven floorplanning is addressed. Given a set of blocks and bus specifications (the width of each bus and the blocks that the bus need to go through), we will generate a floorplan solution such that all the buses go through their blocks, with the area of the floorplan and the total area of the buses minimized. The approach proposed is based on a simulated annealing framework. Using the sequence pair representation, we derived and proved some necessary conditions for feasible buses, for which we allow 0-bend, one-bend, or two-bend. A checking will be performed to identify those buses that cannot be placed simultaneously. Finally, a solution will be generated giving the coordinates of the modules and the buses. Comparing with the results of the most updated work on this problem by Xiang et al. [Bus-driven floorplanning, in: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, 2003, pp. 66–73], our algorithm can handle buses going through many blocks and the dead space of the floorplan obtained is also reduced. For example, if the buses have to go through more than 10 blocks, the approach in Xiang et al. [Bus-driven floorplanning, in: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, 2003, pp. 66–73] is not able to generate any solution while our algorithm can still give solutions of good quality.

A new nonslicing floorplan representation, the moving block sequence (MBS), is proposed in this paper. Our idea of the MBS originates from the observation that placing blocks on a chip has some similarities to playing the game, Tetris®. Because no extra constraints are exerted on solution spaces, the MBS is not only useful for evolutionary algorithms, but also for dealing with rectangular, convex rectilinear, and concave rectilinear blocks, similarly and simultaneously, without partitioning rectilinear blocks into sub-blocks. This is owed to a special structure designed for recording the information of both convex and concave rectilinear blocks in a uniform form. Theoretical analyses show that the computational cost of transforming an MBS to a floorplan with rectangular blocks, in terms of the number of blocks, is between linear and quadratic. Furthermore, as a follow-up of our previous works, a new organizational evolutionary algorithm (OEA) based on the MBS (MBS-OEA) is proposed. With the intrinsic properties of the MBS in mind, three new evolutionary operators are designed in the MBS-OEA. To test the performance of the MBS-OEA, benchmarks with hard rectangular, soft rectangular, and hard rectilinear blocks are used. The number of blocks in these benchmarks varies from 9 to

Abstract—In this paper, we deal with arbitrarily shaped rectilinear module placement using the transitive closure graph (TCG) representation. The geometric meanings of modules are transparent to TCG as well as its induced operations, which makes TCG an ideal representation for floorplanning/placement with arbitrary rectilinear modules. We first partition a rectilinear module into a set of submodules and then derive necessary and sufficient conditions of feasible TCG for the submodules. Unlike most previous works that process each submodule individually and thus need to perform post processing to fix deformed rectilinear modules, our algorithm treats a set of submodules as a whole and thus not only can guarantee the feasibility of each perturbed solution but also can eliminate the need for the postprocessing on deformed modules, implying better solution quality and running time. Experimental results show that our TCG-based algorithm is capable of handling very complex instances; further, it is very efficient and results in better area utilization than previous work. Index Terms—Floorplanning, placement, transitive closure graph. I.