Improving Pin Accessibility of Standard Cells Through Fin Depopulation

For implementing chips with sub-7nm technology, it becomes much hard to access I/O pins on the highly dense standard cells to make physical routes for nets connecting cells. To improve the pin accessibility, in this work, we propose a cell layout optimization technique, which is able to trade fins with MOL (middle-of-line) in-cell routing resource, thus providing more M1 (metal-1) resource available to be used for I/O pin pattern extension, thereby improving the cell pin accessibility.