ASAP: A Transistor Sizing Tool for Speed, Area, and Power Optimization of Static CMOS Circuits

This paper introduces an automated transistor sizing tool (ASAP) that incorporates accurate gatelevel functio~nalm odels and can be used for delay, area, and power optimization of CMOS combinational logic circuits in a VLSI design environment. ASAP considers the performailce improvement of VLSI CMOS circuits by optimally sizing the transistors on the first N critical paths. The global picture of the circuit is considered by taking into account the effects that the transi.stor size changes of one path have on the others. The optimization technique in our sizing tool is based on simulated annealing and couples accurate delay modeling with power and area optimization. The combinatorial minimization of the objective function relies on analytical models that can accurately evaluate the delay, the power and the area of a gate. ASAP has been implemented in C on an Apollo 400 workstation with encouraging results