A Heuristic Algorithm for Minimal Area CMOS Cell Layout

최소 면적의 CMOS 기능셀 설계도면을 찾는 휴리스틱 알고리즘

The problem of generating minimal area CMOS functional cell layout can be converted to that of decomposing the transistor connection graph into a minimum number of subgraphs, each having a pair of Euler paths with the same sequence of input labels on the N-graph and P-graph, which are portions of the graph corresponding to NMOS and PMOS parts respectively. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm which yields a nearly minimal number of Euler paths from the path representation formula which represents the give a logic function. Subpath merging is done through a list processing scheme where the pair of paths which results in the lowest cost is successively merged from all candidate merge pairs until no further path merging and further reduction of number of subgraphs are possible. Two examples were shown where we were able to further reduce the number of interlaces, i.e., the number of non-butting diffusion islands, from 3 to 2, and from 2 to 1, compared to the earlier work [1].