Floorplanning

Floorplanning is the act of designing of a floorplan, which is a kind of bird's-eye view of a structure.

Electronic design automation

In electronic design automation, floorplanning takes in some of the geometrical limitations in a design. Examples of this are:

bonding pads for contacting off-chip (often using wire bonding) are normally located at the circumference of the chip;
line drivers often have to be located as close to bonding pads as possible;
chip area is therefore in some cases given a minimum area in order to fit in the required number of pads;
areas are clustered in order to limit data paths thus frequently featuring defined structures such as cache RAM, multiplier, barrel shifter, line driver and arithmetic logic unit;
purchased intellectual property blocks (such as a processor core) come in ready defined area blocks;
some IP-blocks come with legal limitations such as permitting no routing of signals directly above the block.