Design Methodology for IC Manufacturability Based on Regular Logic-Bricks

Implementing logic blocks in an integrated circuit in terms of repeating or regular geometry patterns [6,7] can provide significant advantages in terms of manufacturability and design cost [2]. Various forms of gate and logic arrays have been recently proposed that can offer such pattern regularity to reduce design risk and costs [2,4,9,11,12]. In this paper, we propose a full-maskset design methodology which provides the same physical design coherence as a configurable array, but with area and other design benefits comparable to standard cell ASICs. This methodology is based on a set of simple logic primitives that are mapped to a set of logic bricks that are defined by a restrictive set of RET(Resolution Enhancement Technique)-friendly geometry patterns. We propose a design methodology to explore trade-offs between the number of bricks and associated level of configurability versus the required silicon area. Results are shown to compare a design implemented with a small number of regular bricks to an implementation based on a full standard cell library in a 90nm CMOS technology