Minimum Implant Area-Aware Placement and Threshold Voltage Refinement

Threshold voltage assignment is a very effective technique to reduce leakage power consumption in modern integrated circuit design. As feature size continues to decrease, the layout constraints [called minimum implant area (MinIA) constraints] on the implant area, which determines the threshold voltage of a device, are becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy. It is necessary to take these constraints into consideration during the placement stage. In this paper, we propose to resolve the MinIA constraint violations of a given placement by performing simultaneous detailed placement and threshold voltage refinement. We first present an optimal and efficient mixed integer-linear programming (MILP)-based algorithm to handle intrarow MinIA constraints. We then extend the MILP-based algorithm to handle both inter-row and intrarow MinIA constraints. Both of our algorithms guarantee to fix all MinIA constraint violations. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms only perturb the original placement and threshold voltage assignment solutions minimally to eliminate all violations and are fast in practice.