Floorplanning

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Floorplanning is the act of designing a birds eye view of a structure. In terms of 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 are is therefor 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 an ARM 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