Improving Performance and Power by Co-Optimizing Middle-of-Line Routing, Pin Pattern Generation, and Contact over Active Gates in Standard Cell Layout Synthesis

This paper addresses the combined problem of the three core tasks, namely routing on the middle-of-line (MOL) layer, generating I/O pin patterns (PP), and allocating contacts over active gates (COAG) in cell layout synthesis with 7nm and below technology. As yet, the existing cell layout generators have paid partial or little attention to those tasks, even with no awareness of the synergistic effects. This work overcomes this limitation by proposing a systematic and tightly-linked solution to the combined problem to boost the synergistic effects on chip implementation. Precisely, we solve the problem in three steps: (1) fully utilizing the horizontal routing resource on MOL layer by formulating the problem of in-cell routing into a weighted interval scheduling problem, (2) simultaneously performing the remaining horizontal in-cell routing and PP generation on metal 1 layer through the COAG exploitation while ensuring the pin accessibility constraint, and (3) completing in-cell routing by allocating vertical routing resource on MOL layer. Through experiments with benchmark designs, it is shown that our proposed layout method is able to generate standard cells with on average 34.2% shorter total length of metal 1 wire while retaining pin patterns that ensure pin accessibility, resulting in the chip implementations with up to 72.5% timing slack improvement and up to 15.6% power reduction that produced by using the conventional best available cells. In addition, by using less wire and vias, our in-cell router is able to consistently reduce the worst delay of cells, noticeably, reducing the sum of setup time and clock-to-Q delay of flip-flops by 1.2% ∼ 3.0% on average over that by the existing best cells.