English

An Extended Study of Gear-Ratio-Aware Standard Cell Layout Generation for DTCO Exploration

Hardware Architecture 2026-03-17 v1

Abstract

Advanced nodes decouple contacted poly pitch (CPP) and lower-metal pitch to improve routability. We present CPCell, an efficient standard-cell layout generation framework, to support arbitrary gear ratio (GR) and offset parameters through a fine-grained layered grid graph and constraint-programming-based placement-routing co-optimization. Layout quality is improved via Middle-of-Line routing, M0 pin enablement, pin accessibility constraints and a weighted multi-objective formulation that jointly optimizes cell layouts. To scale to netlists with up to 48 transistors, we incorporate acceleration techniques including transistor clustering, identical transistor partitioning, routing lower bound tightening and early termination strategies. Comprehensive cell-level and block-level studies are conducted to evaluate GR and offset choices, quantify the benefits of the proposed objectives and assess their impact on power, performance, area and IR-drop outcomes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13665,
  title  = {An Extended Study of Gear-Ratio-Aware Standard Cell Layout Generation for DTCO Exploration},
  author = {Chung-Kuan Cheng and Andrew B. Kahng and Bill Lin and Yucheng Wang and Dooseok Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13665},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 20 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. on CAD