CELLERITY: a fully automatic layout synthesis system for standard cell libraries

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a fully automatic standard-cell layoutsynthesis system, CELLERITY. The system is flexible insupporting a wide variety of process technologies and a range oflibrary template styles. The tool is fully automatic and providesseveral options to the user to customize the layout template. Thetool considers performance and yield and generates dense,design-rule correct layouts. Experimental results indicate that thearea of CELLERITY-generated standard cells is competitive withmanually designed cells in a majority of circuits. In block-leveltests of industrial circuits, standard-cell blocks generated usingCELLERITY cells are about equal to the block area produced byusing a manually-designed library. Recently, an embeddedmicrocontroller in a state-of-the-art sub-micron processtechnology was fabricated using CELLERITY-generated standard cells.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

  C. Computer Systems Organization

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance, Theory