Reduction of CMOS power consumption and signal integrity issues by routing optimization

Abstract

This paper suggests a methodology to decrease the power of a static CMOS standard cell design at layout level by focusing on switched capacitance. The term switched is the key: if a capacitance is not switched often, it may be high. If it is frequently switched, it should be minimized in order to reduce power consumption. This can be done by an algorithm based on forces that automatically optimizes the position and length of every single wire segment in a routed design. The forces are proportional to the toggle activities derived from a gate level simulation. The novelty is that this allows to iteratively find a new topology for the wire segments. Our algorithm takes as input an already given, grid routed layout.