This book presents an artificial intelligence approach to top-down floorplanning of integrated circuits (IC). The approach divides the floorplanning process into separate knowledge-based and algorithmic tasks. This enables the use of IC specialised knowledge to drive sophisticated floorplanning algorithms and interpret their results. This book describes PIAF, a prototype system that implements the developed approach; special attention is paid to a detailed description of the architecture of PIAF, its interference engine, knowledge representation schemes, explanation facility, and a mechanism for backtracking with context recovery. Furthermore, this volume presents in detail new graph theoretical algorithms for floorplan global routing, and area and shape minimisation. The interaction between these algorithms and the knowledge-based components is described. Novel rule-based techniques for the selection of a floorplan from a family of solutions according to design tools capabilities and circuit description are also presented. | An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Integrated Circuit Floorplanning by Marwan A. Jabri, Paperback | Indigo Chapters