| dc.description.abstract | With the advance of process technology, the timing model in current standard cell library format becomes inaccurate when estimating the timing characteristics of circuits. In the nanometer circuit design, the non-linear effects of circuits become more and more obvious. For example, IR drop, signal integrity, etc. And in the nanometer low power circuit design, there are some low power techniques like multiple supply voltages, voltage islands, etc. The above reasons will make the current timing model become hard to maintain its accuracy and it will consume much time to characterize more sets of standard cell library to increase the accuracy. However, nowadays well-known EDA vendors have proposed new timing models called current source model to overcome above reasons and do not have to spend much time to characterize many sets of standard cell library. In this thesis, we find out the characterization flows of new timing model and add the new timing model in our standard cell library format.
In the modern high tech life, the demands for portable consuming products are increasing. Meanwhile, it has to combine many kinds of functions in a product to satisfy the requirements for consumers. For example, multi-media, communication, etc. Especially, with the process technology scaling down, designers have to put many functional circuits into a chip. This will make the power consumption in the unit area become greater and the heat transformed by power consumption increases largely. Heat is a challenge to the reliability of products. Therefore, the power consumption becomes very important for these high tech consuming products. It determines the useful life of the product, the size of battery and the period of useful time. In this thesis, we propose a low power design methodology using mixed-threshold voltage with staying the speed of circuits constant. Using this technique has neither to increase additional circuits nor to change the structure of circuits to obtain the requirement of low power. We apply this methodology to the establishment of standard cell library to create a mixed-threshold voltage standard cell library. | en_US |