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Simultaneous block and I/O buffer floorplanning for flip-chip design

Published: 24 January 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The flip-chip package gives the highest chip density of any packaging method to support the pad-limited ASIC design. One of the most important characteristics of flip-chip designs is that the input/output buffers could be placed anywhere inside a chip. In this paper, we first introduce the floorplanning problem for the flip-chip design and formulate it as assigning the positions of input/output buffers and first-stage/last-stage blocks so that the path length between blocks and bump balls as well as the delay skew of the paths are simultaneously minimized. We then present a hierarchical method to solve the problem. We first cluster a block and its corresponding buffers to reduce the problem size. Then, we go into iterations of the alternating and interacting global optimization step and the partitioning step. The global optimization step places blocks based on simulated annealing using the B*-tree representation to minimize a given cost function. The partitioning step dissects the chip into two subregions, and the blocks are divided into two groups and are placed in respective subregions. The two steps repeat until each subregion contains at most a given number of blocks, defined by the ratio of the total block area to the chip area. At last, we refine the floorplan by perturbing blocks inside a subregion as well as in different subregions. Compared with the B*-tree based floorplanner alone, our method is more efficient and obtains significantly better results, with an average cost of only 51.8% of that obtained by using the B*-tree alone, based on a set of real industrial flip-chip designs provided by leading companies.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)Performance-Driven Assignment of Buffered I/O Signals in Area-I/O Flip-Chip DesignsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/281864221:2(1-24)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2016
  • (2013)Multiple chip planning for chip-interposer codesignProceedings of the 50th Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/2463209.2488767(1-6)Online publication date: 29-May-2013
  • (2013)Unified Padring Design FlowProceedings of the 2013 Fifth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks10.1109/CICSYN.2013.72(418-423)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2013
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cover image ACM Conferences
ASP-DAC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
January 2006
998 pages
ISBN:0780394518

Sponsors

  • IEEE Circuits and Systems Society
  • SIGDA: ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation
  • IEICE ESS: Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Engineering Sciences Society
  • IPSJ SIG-SLDM: Information Processing Society of Japan, SIG System LSI Design Methodology

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 24 January 2006

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Overall Acceptance Rate 466 of 1,454 submissions, 32%

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View all
  • (2016)Performance-Driven Assignment of Buffered I/O Signals in Area-I/O Flip-Chip DesignsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/281864221:2(1-24)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2016
  • (2013)Multiple chip planning for chip-interposer codesignProceedings of the 50th Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/2463209.2488767(1-6)Online publication date: 29-May-2013
  • (2013)Unified Padring Design FlowProceedings of the 2013 Fifth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks10.1109/CICSYN.2013.72(418-423)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2013
  • (2013)Unified Padring Design Flow - New Developments and ResultsProceedings of the 2013 1st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Modelling and Simulation10.1109/AIMS.2013.84(462-466)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2013
  • (2012)A chip-package-board co-design methodologyProceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/2228360.2228557(1082-1087)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2012
  • (2012)Wirelength driven I/O buffer placement for flip-chip with timing-constrained2012 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems10.1109/APCCAS.2012.6419114(631-634)Online publication date: Dec-2012
  • (2011)Timing-constrained I/O buffer placement for flip-chip designs2011 Design, Automation & Test in Europe10.1109/DATE.2011.5763102(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2011
  • (2010)Incremental I/O planning with white space redistribution for flip-chip design2010 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems (ICCCAS)10.1109/ICCCAS.2010.5581856(866-870)Online publication date: Jul-2010
  • (2010)Area-I/O RDL routing for chip-package codesign considering regional assignment2010 IEEE Electrical Design of Advanced Package & Systems Symposium10.1109/EDAPS.2010.5683021(1-4)Online publication date: Dec-2010
  • (2009)Signal skew aware floorplanning and bumper signal assignment technique for flip-chipProceedings of the 2009 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/1509633.1509722(341-346)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2009
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