Simultaneous Transistor Folding and Placement in Standard Cell Layout Synthesis

Abstract

The three major tasks in standard cell layout synthesis are transistor folding, transistor placement, and in-cell routing, which are tightly inter-related, but generally performed one at a time to reduce the extremely high complexity of design space. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach to the two problems of transistor folding and placement. Precisely, we propose a globally optimal algorithm of search tree based design space exploration, devising a set of effective speeding up techniques as well as dynamic programming based fast cost computation. In addition, our algorithm incorporates the minimum OD (oxide diffusion) jog constraint, which closely relies on both of transistor folding and placement. To our knowledge, this is the first work that tries to simultaneously solve the two problems. Through experiments with the transistor netlists and design rules in the ASAP 7nm library, it is shown that our proposed method is able to synthesize fully routable cell layouts of minimal size within 1 second for each netlist, outperforming the cell layout quality in the ASAP 7nm library, which otherwise, may take several hours or days to manually complete layouts of the quality level comparable to ours.