Electrical characterization of a C-Element with LiChEn

This demonstration presents the use of the Library Characterization Environment (LiChEn) for characterizing asynchronous standard cells. The tool was employed for the electrical characterization of a library with over five hundred asynchronous standard cells. In this work, a case study of a fundamental asynchronous component, the C-Element, will be presented to validate the use of the tool. LiChEn was designed due to the necessity of automating the process of characterizing asynchronous standard cells. Albeit this task can be done with tools from industrial EDA vendors, the use of these proved to require laborious manual work. These tools were designed for characterizing standard cells for synchronous systems and usually fail to recognize complex asynchronous logic. Moreover, asynchronous components are not available off the shelf in typical standard cell libraries, which constrains the asynchronous paradigm for full-custom approaches. As asynchronous techniques gain relevance in the research community, LiChEn can present a practical solution for a wider adoption of such techniques, by allowing an automated characterization of asynchronous standard cells.