Abstract: An electronic design automation method of placing circuit components of an integrated circuit (“IC”) is provided. A synthesized circuit netlist including one or more soft macros is received and a rough global placement of this netlist is performed. A shaper function is determined. The shaper function evaluates a cost of a current placement of the one or more soft macros based on one or more constraints and one or more penalty functions which are associated with the one or more constraints. Moreover, the current placement is optimized to produce a subsequent placement of the one or more soft macros by minimizing the cost. Furthermore, where the netlist includes one or more hard macros, a legalization requirement is applied to the one or more hard macros.

Abstract: Placement or floorplanning of an integrated circuit is performed by constructing legal layouts at every level of a hierarchy of subsets of modules representing the integrated circuit, by scalably incorporating legalization into each level of the hierarchy, so that satisfiability of constraints is explicitly enforced at every level, in order to eliminate backtracking and post-hoc legalization.

Abstract: A system of delivering personalized streaming content to a destination based on automatic detection of context. A thin stream gateway delivers content to all devices in range, where the range is intentionally limited. Bidirectional communication is established between a fixed and a mobile gateway. The mobile gateway deduces its location from the streams received by the fixed gateway. The mobile gateway provides personal information to the fixed gateway. Handoff between gateways is also supported. The gateways can also form a blanket, that can be used to support ad hoc communication.