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Industrial Floorplanning and Prototyping
Published in Charles J. Alpert, Dinesh P. Mehta, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Handbook of Algorithms for Physical Design Automation, 2008
Floorplanning and prototyping may be flat or hierarchical. In a flat floorplan, the entire design is treated as a single problem, and any cell or block can be placed at any location in the design. There is no need to assign cells and pins to the blocks, or create block budgets for timing or power. This flat design style is conceptually straightforward and provides maximum implementation flexibility. However, it has several disadvantages, especially for large designs. It may stress the limits of tools (which often cannot handle a large design flat) as well as humans, who may not be able to easily understand such a design. Because every detail of the design interacts, there may be no easy way to divide the work among teams. Flat design may well make changes more difficult, because they are less localized, which can also impact design closure [27]. For these and other reasons, many chips are designed hierarchically. In this case, the chip surface is divided into areas, commonly called blocks. Each block represents an independent design problem—all cells assigned to the block must be placed inside it, and all wires purely internal to the block must be routed within its boundary. Signals that connect to the rest of the design are brought to pins, where the routing from the rest of the design will connect. These pins must be assigned locations and layers for each block, and each block must be assigned a definite size and location within the chip. All design constraints must be budgeted among the blocks. Foremost among these constraints are timing and power. The budgeting process is crucial, in particular, one infeasible budget (among tens of thousands of pins) can make the whole design infeasible, where it might be easily completed using a flat flow.
From skeuomorphism to flat design: age-related differences in performance and aesthetic perceptions
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2022
Inês Cunha Vaz Pereira Urbano, João Pedro Vieira Guerreiro, Hugo Miguel Aleixo Albuquerque Nicolau
However, since the advent of Windows Phone 7 in 2010, flat user interfaces have been widely adopted from mobile to Web interfaces. For example, Apple shifted from skeuomorphism to flat design since iOS 7 (2013). Flat design adopts a minimalist approach where interfaces are stripped down to their barest essentials. Abstract graphic forms replace realistic icons (e.g. the ‘hamburger’ icon) and bold colours are used to fill spaces. Text is often used with condensed and light variations of typefaces resulting in low density of screen information. This design philosophy emerged as skeuomorph interfaces grew increasingly complex and cluttered. The flat design represents a self-contained two-dimensional digital environment where there is no place for anything replicating three-dimensional objects of the real-world (Banga and Weinhold 2014). Flat interfaces are designed to be perceived as modern and minimalistic without visual distractions that can help users of all ages to focus on what matters the most. After its introduction, flat design was widely criticised by human–computer interaction experts1,2,3,4 as it ignores the three-dimensional nature of the human brain. For instance, visual cues that reference real-world properties such as texture, lighting, and shadows are removed from flat design, which can render interfaces harder to understand and use (Burmistrov et al. 2015; Creager and Gillan 2016).