I'm curious to know the differences between decap ...
# shuttle
j
I'm curious to know the differences between decap cells of various drive strengths. Could someone please explain? Thank you.
t
Decap cells don't drive outputs, so they don't have "drive strengths". Instead, the suffix is just referring to the size of the cell in multiples of the unit cell width.
j
Makes sense, thank you! Does that mean, larger cells store more capacitance/charge compared to the smaller cells?
t
Yes.
j
Okay, this helps a lot! I'm working with decap cells to find the intensity of Single Event Transients and mitigate the same. Is it possible to replace various sized decaps cells with the largest one? Will that impact my design?
t
We have done a lot of decap cell replacement, mainly because the SkyWater cells had too much local interconnect and were causing issues with metal density. So yes, you can replace decap cells as long as the total width matches. If you want to modify the total amount of decap, I suggest swapping out decap cells for the same size fill cell.
j
That's a great idea! Thank you very much for your response.
t
You could check with Jeff DiCorpo. . . Somewhere we have a script that we were using that automatically swaps out a given percentage of decap cells for fill (or possibly vice versa, or maybe either one, but easy enough to adapt to your needs).
j
Oh great! Sure, I will check him and try to adapt the script in my design. Thanks for letting me know about this.