Laker™ Custom Row Placer

The Laker™ Custom Row Placer provides unique automation for placement of digital custom and standard cells within the Laker Custom Layout environment. It allows precise custom design of the digital blocks often used in mixed signal and custom digital designs in order to meet the critical performance requirements that often times cannot be achieved with a standalone digital automatic place and route (P&R) tool. Its proprietary technology allows you to:

• Save time with automated creation of digital blocks without leaving the Laker Custom Layout environment
• Achieve the performance of full-custom layout with the speed of P&R 
• Enjoy the confidence of using proven standard cells while maintaining hand-crafted quality

Superior Results with Less Effort

The Laker Custom Row Placer allows you to obtain optimum placement results with ease by allowing you to:

• Quickly and automatically place standard cells, optimized for minimum wire length
• Perform incremental selection and placement
• Undergo internal iterations to pack placement area
• Manually optimize placement, layout or routing with any of the standard features of the Laker Custom Layout Automation System
• Avoid the set-up, data translation, and time penalty of using a standalone P&R tool
• Work seamlessly with the Laker Custom Digital Router

Core features include:

Hundreds of companies have deployed the laker Custom Layout Automation System in their design flows to produce high-quality, high-density layout of advanced chip designs. The Laker automation technologies reduce the effort required to obtain optimal layout by helping you:

• Support for fixed-height standard cell, custom cell, and double height cell designs
• Stacking utilities for datapath-style placement
• Row snapping and overlap removal
• Congestion-driven placement to minimize wire length
• Automatic and manual addition and removal of filler, well tap, and end cap cells
• The ability to honor placement and pin blockages
• Coordination with the Custom Digital Router to assure routable and DRC-clean placement
• Automated pin generation

The Laker Custom Row Placer

Part of the Laker Custom Layout Automation System

The Laker Custom Row Placer works seamlessly within the Laker Custom Layout Automation System so that design can be completed in a single environment – even a full-custom mixed signal design - for even greater time savings.  Working in a unified environment removes the need for the design to move between layout and P&R tools and avoids the associated data integrity issues.

You can take advantage of all the features offered by the Laker layout system without data translation or compatibility issues thereby providing greater quality of results than any digital implementation system alone. Now you can achieve results that are comparable to full-custom layout for custom digital blocks that might otherwise be too large, or too time-consuming to do by hand.

In addition, because cell placement is incremental, you can take advantage of the built-in Laker ECO capability. At any time during the layout process, you can import a modified netlist and Laker will automatically identify discrepancies between the netlist and the existing layout, assist in making the necessary changes, and preserve any manual optimization that you may have already completed. This feature alone can save many frustrating hours or days of wasted effort and frees the designer to maximize the quality of the design.

For the first time there truly is a "mixed” design flow for mixed-signal design!

The OpenAccess (OA) complaint versions of the Laker Custom Layout Automation System, the Laker Custom Row Placer, and the Laker Custom Digital Router are now available.

Download the datasheet

Read the Whitepaper on Digital Place & Route