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Low Power Design | Physical Design | Static & Dynamic Power | Leakage Current | Part 2 The goal of low power design is to reduce the individual components of power as much as possible, thereby reducing the overall power consumption. The power equation contains components for dynamic and static power. Dynamic power is comprised of switching and short-circuit power; whereas static power is comprised of leakage, or current that flows through the transistor when there is no activity.  The higher the voltage, the higher the power consumed by each component, resulting in higher overall power. Conversely, the lower the voltage, the lower the overall power. To achieve the best performance with the lowest power consumption, tradeoffs for each of these different factors are tried and tested via various low power techniques and methodologies. Static Power Consumption When a circuit is in a quiescent state, meaning there is no activity or clock signal, it still consumes power, known a...

Low Power Design | Physical Design | Part 1 Understanding Low Power Design: Low power design is a collection of techniques and methods that help reduce the overall power consumption of an integrated circuit (IC). This includes both the dynamic and static power components. Think of it like this: when an IC is in use, it consumes power, and that power consumption can be broken down into two main categories - dynamic power and static power. Dynamic power is the power consumed when the IC is actively switching between different states, like when it's processing data or transmitting signals. Static power, on the other hand, is the power consumed even when the IC is idle, like when it's in standby mode. The goal of low power design is to minimize both dynamic and static power consumption, making the IC as energy-efficient as possible. This is super important for portable devices like smartphones, laptops, and wearables, where battery life is a major concern. Imagine being able to use...

Lakhs of Base DRC at Floorplan/Placement database: Let's say you are working on one of the complex blocks of chip designing and you are responsible for closing the Place-and-Route (PnR) activity of the design. You are responsible for doing floor-planning, placement, clock tree synthesis, routing, and signoff activities. Floorplan is one of the most important tasks in physical design activities. One of the major tasks in floor-planning is macro placement, identification, and creation of physical power domains based on UPF, doing power planning including placement of physical cells like tap cells, boundary cells, power switches, guard rings, marker cells, and a few others. Let's say you completed the floor-planning and are ready to go for placement. Before going to the placement run, have you done sanity checks to ensure that your floorplan is completely clean and okay? For a sanity check with respect to physical violations, don't consider timing as of now to limit the discus...

Longer Routing Length | Physical Design | Tcl Scripting In the routing stage of physical design, one of the most important sanity checks is to find out the length of the longer nets. However, EDA tools optimize the length of each net to meet its timing and DRC requirements. Despite their best efforts, EDA tools may not always optimize net lengths due to various reasons such as complexity of the design, limited visibility into the design's timing and signal integrity requirements, inadequate or incomplete design constraints, insufficient optimization algorithms or resources, and trade-offs between different design objectives. What is the impact of longer routing lengths on timing? Longer routing lengths lead to greater delay and can cause timing violations. To mitigate timing violations due to longer routing lengths, techniques such as layer promotion can be used, where the tool promotes the net to a higher metal layer based on needs and violations to meet the timing requirements....