pace when all modules are hard.

For this reason, a large body of literature has

recently been devoted to various new representations of non-slicing floorplans
to improve space utilization. The authors of [Lai and Wong, 2001] showed that
a simple compaction procedure extends the capability of normalized polish
expression to represent non-slicing floorplans. They conclude that slicing tree
is a complete floorplan representation for all non-slicing floorplans as well.
ILP-based Floorplanning Algorithm
In [Moh et al., 1996], floorplanning with soft modules is formulated as a
non-linear geometric programming. It is well-known that the geometric pro-
gramming problem, after a simple transformation, can be converted into a
convex optimization problem, which in turn can be solved efficiently by a non-
linear solver. The advantage of this approach over the mixed integer linear
programming by [Sutanthavibul et al., 1991] is that it does not suffer from
the solution degradation caused by various schemes to linearize non-linear
objectives and constraints.
The number of variables and constraints used in [Moh et al., 1996] is signif-
icantly reduced in a new convex programming formulation presented in [Chen
and Fan, 1998]. Since the complexity of solving a convex programming prob-
lem typically increases dramatically with the numbers of variables and con-
straints, this new formulation leads to a significant reduction of computational
effort in solving the floorplan area minimization problem.
The works by [Moh et al., 1996] and [Chen and Fan, 1998] are not scalable
because they suffer from the high complexity to solve a convex program-
ming problem. The authors of [Chen and Kuh, 2000] presented a new linear
programming (LP) based formulation that handles soft, hard, and pre-placed
modules. They solve a set of LP problems in an iterative fashion to obtain
global minimum solution. They do not use integer variables and constraints,
thereby further speeding up the runtime compared to [Sutanthavibul et al.,
1991].
The authors of [Ekpanyapong et al., 2004] adopted the mixed integer linear
programming formulation of [Sutanthavibul et al., 1991] to perform floorplan-
ning with micro-architectural modules. A major difference between floorplan-
ning with circuit modules and micro-architectural modules is that