In this first entry in the Laymanized series, we’ll take a look at my first publication and dive into the topic of standard cell characterization.
First, a brief Disclaimer
I do NOT intend for this site to be exclusively a showcase for my own work. I want to talk about all sorts of stuff from all sorts of people, like David Harvey’s optimizations to NTT or David Harris’s taxonomy for parallel prefix networks. (Also, I’m not just going cover works from people named David H. This was a coincidence, I promise). However, if I’m going to try to explain difficult and complex VLSI topics, it’s nice to start with stuff I know.
Ok, disclaimer over. Let’s get into this.
Organization
This entry is broken up into three parts.
- In the first part, we’ll go over background information you’ll need in order to understand the paper.
- In the next part (coming soon), we’ll look at how CharLib works under the hood.
- In the third and final part (coming a little less soon), we’ll compare CharLib to other standard cell characterization tools, and discuss future goals for the project.
CharLib is an open source project and can be found here on GitHub. I wrote it over the course of about a year, building on ideas from several existing works and with lots of input from my advisor, Dr. James Stine.
You can find the paper in the proceedings of the 2024 IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems.
At the time of writing, the publication is not yet publicly available. I’ll update this soon with a link.