@User As a follow-up to Sylvain's question, can we fill

met1

like in caravel user_project_example instead of adding fillers ?

@tgingold: Are you referring about to metal fill? (to satisfy the metal density requirements)

No. I was very interested by the fact you don't fill the rows of

user_project_example

. It really speed up the tool. I wanted to do the same until I realized it works as long as you don't use standard cells (and in particular diodes).

@tgingold: Ah, I see. You can add the diodes on the I/O pins within each block in the design, so that you don't have to place any standard cells in

user_project_wrapper

and just have to place and route/power-route macros. I did that (or something like that) with

user_proj_wrapper

for the speed up you mention + it makes no sense to place ~700 cells in a 10mm^2 area -- the tools suffer with such low utilizations.

Is there an easy way (a command) to automatically insert a diode on the I/O pins ? Maybe I could write it.

@tgingold: This script (https://github.com/efabless/openlane/blob/develop/scripts/openroad/or_diodes.tcl) inserts diodes on cell and macro pins. You can probably start from there if you have the time.