A Systematic Removal of Minimum Implant Area Violations under Timing Constraint

Abstract

Fixing minimum implant area (MIA) violations in the post-route layout is an essential and inevitable task for the high-performance designs employing multiple threshold voltages. Unlike the conventional approaches, which have tried to locally move cells or reassign V-t (threshold voltage) of some cells in a way to resolve the MIA violations with little or no consideration of timing constraint, our proposed approach fully and systematically controls the timing budget during the removal of MIA violations. Precisely, our solution consists of three sequential steps: (1) performing critical path aware cell selection for V-t reassignment to fix the intra-row MIA violations while considering timing constraint and minimal power increments; (2) performing a theoretically optimal V-t reassignment to fix the inter-row MIA violations while satisfying both of the intra-row MIA and timing constraints; (3) refining V-t reassignment to further reduce the power consumption while meeting intra- and inter-row MIA constraints as well as timing constraints. Experiments through benchmark circuits show that our proposed approach is able to completely resolve MIA violations while ensuring no timing violation and achieving much less power increments over that by the conventional approaches.