ADDRESSING NOISE DECOUPLING IN MIXED-SIGNAL ICS - POWER DISTRIBUTION DESIGN AND CELL CUSTOMIZATION

An important and largely unexplored aspect of power distribution synth esis is cell customization. Through automatic cell customization, powe r I/O cell assignments and local substrate and power supply decoupling may be tailored to reduce deleterious noise effects on analog circuit s in mixed-signal environments, Techniques for simultaneous power grid design (topology and sizing) and cell configuration/customization are described that allow designers to handle more difficult chip-level no ise problems, Synthesis results on an industrial mixed-signal example demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.