Nostradamus: a floorplanner of uncertain designs

Floorplanning is an early phase in chip planning. It provides information on approximate area, delay, power, and other performance measures. Careful floorplanning is thus of extreme importance. In many applications while a good floorplan is needed, not all modules’ information are available, or even worse, part of the provided information is inaccurate. Floorplanning with uncertainty is the problem of obtaining a good floorplan under uncertainty. In this paper, the floorplanning problem with uncertainty is formulated. It is established that traditional floorplanners are incapable of handling uncertainty. An effective method for dealing with uncertain data is proposed. Experiments show that, for example, with up to 30% input uncertainty an area estimate with less than 7% error can be obtained.