Fence-Region-Aware Mixed-Height Standard Cell Legalization

We propose a fence-region-aware mixed-height standard cell legalization that can optimize the placement of standard cells that have more than a two row height in various shapes of the fence region. The algorithm consists of pre-legalization and mixed-height standard cell legalization steps to prioritize cell legalization; then a quality refinement step that uses simulated annealing reduces the displacement. Our proposed method achieved 63% improvement in the average quality score and 72% improvement in average runtime, compared to the winners of the ICCAD-2017 contest.