High-quality Circuit Synthesis for Modern Technologies

Lech Jozwiak1,  Artur Chojnacki2,  Aleksander Slusarczyk1
1Eindhoven University of Technology, 2PDF Solutions Inc.


Abstract

Introduction of the nano CMOS technologies created unusual opportunities, but also resulted in many new difficult to solve issues, changed importance relationships among various circuit characteristics, and largely invalidated the traditional circuit synthesis technologies. In consequence, the opportunities created by modern microelectronic technology cannot effectively be exploited, because of weaknesses in traditional circuit synthesis methods used in today’s CAD tools. This paper is devoted to an adequate synthesis of digital circuits for the modern nano CMOS circuit implementation technologies. It discusses the issues and requirements of circuit synthesis for the nano CMOS technologies, and introduces our new quality and information driven circuit synthesis technology that satisfies these requirements. It compares the experimental results from our new circuit synthesis tool to the results from some other tools and demonstrates that our tool produces very fast, compact and low-power circuits, and outperforms other methods and tools. It discusses some of the major advantages of our new circuit synthesis technology that include: superior result quality, generality, extremely high flexibility and synthesis precision, regularity of the circuit structures synthesized, minimization of the number and length of interconnections, very effective and efficient processing of incompletely specified functions, direct synthesis from the RTL-level into the technology primitives, and enhanced route-ability. It shows that this technology is adequate for the modern nano CMOS synthesis targets.