Timing driven cell replication during placement for cycle time optimization

摘要

This paper presents a new timing driven approach for cell replication tailored to the practical needs of standard cell layout design.l Cell replication methods have been studied extensively in the context of generic partitioning problems. However, until now it has rmained unclear what practical benefit can be obtained from this concept in a realistic enviornment for timing-driven layout synthesis. Therfore, this paper presents a timing-driven cell replication procedure, demonstrates its incorporation into a standard cell placement and routing tool and, for the first time, examines its benefit on the final circuit performance in compariosn with conventional gate- or transisor-sizing techniques.