WB-Trees: A Meshed Tree Representation for FinFET Analog Layout Designs*

Abstract

The emerging design requirements with the FinFET technology, along with traditional geometrical constraints, make the FinFET-based analog placement even more challenging. Previous works can handle only partial FinFET-induced design constraints because some new constraints are intrinsically different from the traditional ones; as a result, directly extending previous methods to handle FinFET-induced constraints would incur solution quality degradation and runtime overhead. To remedy these disadvantages, we present a new hybrid graph (meshed tree) representation of a window mesh and CB-trees (namely, WB-trees) and a new placement flow with effective and efficient schemes to simultaneously handle FinFET-based design constraints and traditional ones. Experimental results based on industrial designs with various constraints show that our placer outperforms published works in both solution quality and runtime.