Triple patterning lithography aware optimization for standard cell based design

Triple Patterning Lithography (TPL) is regarded as a promising technique to handle the manufacturing challenges in 14nm and beyond technology node. It is necessary to consider TPL in early design stages to make the layout more TPL friendly and reduce the manufacturing cost. In this paper, we propose a flow to co-optimize cell layout decomposition and detailed placement. Our cell decomposition approach can enumerate all coloring solutions with the minimum number of stitches. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform the existing work in all aspects of stitch number, HPWL and running time.