Electronic Design Automation

1.4. Physical Design Automation

Physical design refers to all synthesis steps that convert a circuit representation (in terms of gates and transistors) into a geometric representation (in terms of polygons and their shapes) [Sherwani 1999; Chang 2007]. An example is illustrated in Figure 1.14. The geometric representation, also called layout, is used to design masks and then manufacture a chip. Because the design process is fairly complicated in nature, modern physical design typically is divided into three major steps: (1) floorplanning, (2) placement, and (3) routing. Floorplanning is an essential design step for a hierarchical, building block design method. It assembles circuit blocks into a rectangle (chip) to optimize a predefined cost ...