rmalized Polish Expression

The authors of [Young and Wong, 1998] extended the normalized polish
expression [Wong and Liu, 1986] to handle pre-placed modules. They pro-
posed a shape curve computation procedure that can take the positions of the
pre-placed modules into consideration. The shape curve computation proce-
dure is used repeatedly during the floorplanning process to fully exploit the
shape flexibility of the modules.
Floorplanning with uncertainty is the problem of obtaining a good floorplan
when the information about module dimensions is not complete. In this for-
mulation introduced by [Bazargan et al., 1999], the width and the height of the
modules are random variables instead of fixed values. The authors extended
the normalized polish expression to handle these random variables and used
statistical addition and maximum operations to compute the distributions of
the final floorplan area.
Bus routability is another important issue in floorplanning because the blocks
are usually connected with very wide buses, causing congestion and routing
failure. The authors of [Rafiq et al., 2003] considered bus routability, area, and
timing objectives in their slicing floorplanning formulation. In order to improve98
PRACTICAL PROBLEMS IN VLSI PHYSICAL DESIGN AUTOMATION
the timing, they use channels in between the blocks for buffer insertion, which
is done by exploiting the slicing structure and its normalized polish expression.