A mixed cells physical design approach

This work presents a design flow using a mixed cells design approach, mixing standard cells from a library with cells generated automatically with ASTRAN [1]. Moreover, a new technique using Artificial Neural Networks was developed to perform a comparison between two different cells, a standard cell one and ASTRAN´s cell. Also, a new tool capable of performing cell replacements (between ASTRAN and standard cells) was developed willing to improve power consumption and area. So, there is a mixing of automatic cell synthesis tool and commercial synthesis tools dedicated to synthesize circuits using standard cells. Comparisons have shown that the presented approach was able to produce satisfactory results considering area and power consumption, with on average, 3.77% less power consumption and 1.25% less area.