Piano: A Multi-Constraint Pin Assignment-Aware Floorplanner Article Swipe

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Zeshui Xu , Kexin Zhou , Jie Wang , Zijie Geng , Siyuan Xu , Shixiong Kai , Mingxuan Yuan , Feng Wu ·

YOU? · · 2025 · Open Access ·

Floorplanning is a critical step in VLSI physical design, increasingly complicated by modern constraints such as fixed-outline requirements, whitespace removal, and the presence of pre-placed modules. In addition, the assignment of pins on module boundaries significantly impacts the performance of subsequent stages, including detailed placement and routing. However, traditional floorplanners often overlook pin assignment with modern constraints during the floorplanning stage. In this work, we introduce Piano, a floorplanning framework that simultaneously optimizes module placement and pin assignment under multiple constraints. Specifically, we construct a graph based on the geometric relationships among modules and their netlist connections, then iteratively search for shortest paths to determine pin assignments. This graph-based method also enables accurate evaluation of feedthrough and unplaced pins, thereby guiding overall layout quality. To further improve the design, we adopt a whitespace removal strategy and employ three local optimizers to enhance layout metrics under multi-constraint scenarios. Experimental results on widely used benchmark circuits demonstrate that Piano achieves an average 6.81% reduction in HPWL, a 13.39% decrease in feedthrough wirelength, a 16.36% reduction in the number of feedthrough modules, and a 21.21% drop in unplaced pins, while maintaining zero whitespace.

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Type: article
Language: en
Landing Page: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13161
PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13161
OA Status: green
OpenAlex ID: https://openalex.org/W4414530089

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OpenAlex ID: https://openalex.org/W4414530089

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Title: Piano: A Multi-Constraint Pin Assignment-Aware Floorplanner

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Type: article

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Language: en

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Publication year: 2025

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Publication date: 2025-07-20

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Authors: Zeshui Xu, Kexin Zhou, Jie Wang, Zijie Geng, Siyuan Xu, Shixiong Kai, Mingxuan Yuan, Feng Wu

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Landing page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13161

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Cited by: 0

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