Title
Timing-Aware Fill Insertions with Design-Rule and Density Constraints
Abstract
Metal fill insertion has become an essential step to reduce dielectric thickness variation and improve pattern uniformity, which is important in mitigating process variations, thereby achieving better manufacturing yield. However, metal fills could induce coupling capacitance, which is not often considered in existing works that typically focus more on pattern density uniformity, incurring significant problems in timing closure. In this paper, we address the timing-aware fill insertion problem that considers the total capacitance and density constraints simultaneously. First, initial metal fill insertion and design-rule-aware legalization are used to quickly obtain an initial fill insertion solution. Second, from critical conductors to powers/grounds in a circuit, we divide conductors into different equivalent paths and then construct a capacitance graph to globally reduce the capacitance of each equivalent path. Third, we present a density-aware coupling capacitance optimization method and a fast Monte Carlo based fill selection to further reduce the coupling capacitance between any pair of conductors. Finally, we present a density-aware fill deletion method to reduce the fill amounts. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm based on the benchmarks of the 2018 CAD Contest at ICCAD and its official contest evaluator. Compared with the first place team of the contest and the state-of-the-art work, experimental results show that our algorithm achieves the lowest total capacitance and the least fill amount for each benchmark.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICCAD45719.2019.8942079
2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)
Keywords
Field
DocType
equivalent paths,density-aware fill deletion method,fast Monte Carlo based fill selection,density-aware coupling capacitance optimization method,equivalent path,capacitance graph,critical conductors,initial fill insertion solution,design-rule-aware legalization,initial metal fill insertion,timing-aware fill insertion problem,timing closure,pattern density uniformity,metal fills,manufacturing yield,process variations,pattern uniformity,dielectric thickness variation,density constraints,timing-aware fill insertions
CAD,Graph,Monte Carlo method,Coupling,Capacitance,Computer science,Electrical conductor,Electronic engineering,Dielectric thickness,Timing closure
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1933-7760
978-1-7281-2351-6
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tingshen Lan100.68
Xingquan Li293.29
Jianli Chen363.86
Jun Yu402.37
Lei He5167.77
Senhua Dong600.34
Wenxing Zhu701.69
Yao-Wen Chang83437253.54