How to identify design in terms of track ?

[kartikpujari]

hi ,
can anyone guide me what we mean by saying a design is a 9 track design or a 12 track design?
how do we identify our design in context with previous question?

Regards .

[ThisIsNotSam]

hi ,
can anyone guide me what we mean by saying a design is a 9 track design or a 12 track design?
how do we identify our design in context with previous question?

Regards .

number of tracks is a property of the standard cell library. it effectively means the height of the cells. it is weird to refer to a design as being X track design. a design can have many blocks, and the blocks can be of different heights.

[vijay82]

Library cells can be divided into two when taking about tracks - standard cells (GP logic like AND/OR) and datapath cells (eg arithmetic blocks). The former have fixed height and variable width (thus the X2, X4 variants for AND gates you may have seen in the .lib which internally means they have more or less resistance, depending, with consequent effect seen on drive strength). The latter are custom blocks thus fixed width and heights. When speaking of an 'X-track library' we mean the height of standard cells. You can see the value in the databook of the library, in the form of a pdf in or around the same directory where the .lib is placed. The conversion of #tracks to nanometers will obviously be foundry-dependent but one 6T library I worked with recently was equivalent to 240nm cell height, again obtained from the databook.