Abstract
This paper presents a design flow that optimizes a standard cell based circuit for performance by implementing critical paths in a Programmable Logic Array (PLA). Given a standard-cell based circuit as input, our approach iteratively extracts critical paths from this circuit, which are then implemented using a PLA circuit. PLAs are a good candidate for such an approach, since they exhibit a gradual increase in delay as additional vectors are added. In subsequent iterations, these critical paths are treated as don't cares, allowing the standard cell based design to be simplified after each iteration. The final design consists of a portion which is implemented using a PLA, and another portion which is implemented using standard cells. We demonstrate that on average, our approach can achieve about 22.5% improvement in the SPICE based delay of a design, along with a placed-and-routed area improvement of 11%.
Published Version
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