Abstract
This paper considers the constrained floorplanning problem in the context of a design scenario where floorplans are required to contain some white space to facilitate subsequent buffer insertion. An elegant bounded iterative methodology for floorplan-refinement based on the min-cost max-flow formulation of Feng et al [1] augmented by a heuristic area-redistribution algorithm is presented. This approach results in substantially bet-ter quality floorplans than previously reported as substantiated by our experimental results.