Cellerity

Abstract

This paper describes a fully automatic standard-cell layout synthesis system, CELLERITY. The system is flexible in supporting a wide variety of process technologies and a range of library template styles. The tool is fully automatic and provides several options to the user to customize the layout template. The tool considers performance and yield and generates dense, design-rule correct layouts. Experimental results indicate that the area of CELLERITY-generated standard cells is competitive with manually designed cells in a majority of circuits. In block-level tests of industrial circuits, standard-cell blocks generated using CELLERITY cells are about equal to the block area produced by using a manually-designed library. Recently, an embedded microcontroller in a state-of-the-art sub-micron process technology was fabricated using CELLERITY-generated standard cells.