Abstract
Unused spare cells occur inevitably in traditional ECO design flow.It results in inefficient area usage, more leakage, more IR drop impacts and fixed locations of spare cell. To tackle these problems, a reconfigurable cell is proposed which served the dual purposes of decoupling capacitance and spare cell in this thesis. Before Engineering Change Order (ECO) is applied, these cells are pre-placed as decoupling capacitors. When ECO is applied, these cells are configured as spare cells. Moreover, based on our reconfigurable cell design, we proposed an algorithm to demonstrate the efficiency of our configurable cell for timing closure and IR drop minimization simultaneously. Compared with traditional ECO flow, our reconfigurable ECO flow shows 20% IR drop reduction and 56% reduction in leakage of spare cells with 10% spare area. In addition, there are less unsolved ECO timing paths left afterapplying our ECO timing optimization algorithm.