Design method of semiconductor chip

Abstract

Both logical and physical construction of voltage islands is disclosed. A semiconductor chip design is partitioned into 'bins', which are areas of the design. In this way, a semiconductor chip design may be 'sliced' into various areas and the areas may then be assigned to various voltage levels. Each bin may be thought of as a voltage island. Circuits in the design can be added to or removed from the various bins, thereby increasing or decreasing the speed and power of the circuits: the speed and power increase if a circuit is placed into a bin assigned a higher voltage, and the speed and power decrease if a circuit is placed into a bin having a lower voltage. The size and location of the bins may also be changed. By iterating these steps, the optimum power consumption may be met while still meeting speed constraints and other criteria. The present invention is applicable to any placement environment, such as an annealing placement tool, that proceeds through successive refinement of the locations of the circuits on the design and in which the placement process may be interrupted to make changes in placement of the logic.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates generally to computer aided circuit placement on semiconductor chips, and in particular to parallel logical and physical structures of voltage islands for mixed supply voltage designs. Background technique [0002] The conversion power of digital circuits increases with the square of the supply voltage. Thus, reducing this voltage is required to reduce circuit power consumption. However, reducing the supply voltage also degrades circuit performance. Therefore, it is required to combine circuits driven by a higher power supply voltage and circuits driven by a lower power supply voltage (hereinafter referred to as high and low voltage circuits, respectively) on the same chip. Use high voltage circuits where needed to achieve the desired circuit performance and low voltage circuits elsewhere. [0003] When high and low voltage circuits are combined on one semiconductor chip in this way, it is requir...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, having to distribute different power and logic clusters everywhere greatly increases the number of level shifters

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