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Contents:
  1. endcap cell
    1. 1. Definition: What is endcap cell?
    2. 2. Components and Operating Principles
      1. 2.1 Internal Circuitry
    3. 3. Related Technologies and Comparison
    4. 4. References
    5. 5. One-line Summary

endcap cell

1. Definition: What is endcap cell?

Endcap cell๋Š” VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ๋งค์šฐ ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋กœ, ์ฃผ๋กœ ๋””์ง€ํ„ธ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋Š” ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ๋๋ถ€๋ถ„์— ๋ฐฐ์น˜๋˜์–ด ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์ „๋‹ฌ์„ ์ตœ์ ํ™”ํ•˜๊ณ  ์ „์ฒด ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ํ–ฅ์ƒ์‹œํ‚ค๋Š” ์—ญํ• ์„ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. Endcap cell์€ ํŠนํžˆ ํƒ€์ด๋ฐ ๋ฌธ์ œ๋ฅผ ํ•ด๊ฒฐํ•˜๊ณ , ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์ง€์—ฐ์„ ์ตœ์†Œํ™”ํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ์ „๋ ฅ ์†Œ๋ชจ๋ฅผ ์ค„์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ๊ธฐ์—ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ํŠน์„ฑ ๋•๋ถ„์— endcap cell์€ ๊ณ ์† ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ํ•„์ˆ˜์ ์ธ ์š”์†Œ๋กœ ์ž๋ฆฌ ์žก๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Endcap cell์€ ์ผ๋ฐ˜์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋‘ ๊ฐ€์ง€ ์ฃผ์š” ๊ธฐ๋Šฅ์„ ์ˆ˜ํ–‰ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ฒซ์งธ, ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ๋๋ถ€๋ถ„์—์„œ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์•ˆ์ •์„ฑ์„ ๋ณด์žฅํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Š” ์‹ ํ˜ธ๊ฐ€ ์ถœ๋ ฅ๋˜๊ธฐ ์ „์— ์ถฉ๋ถ„ํ•œ ์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๋™์•ˆ ์•ˆ์ •์ ์œผ๋กœ ์œ ์ง€๋  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋„๋ก ๋„์™€์ค๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‘˜์งธ, endcap cell์€ ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์ „๋ฐ˜์ ์ธ ์ „๊ธฐ์  ํŠน์„ฑ์„ ๊ฐœ์„ ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ๊ธฐ์—ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด, endcap cell์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ๋ฐ˜์‚ฌ ๋ฐ ์™œ๊ณก์„ ์ค„์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ๋„์›€์„ ์ฃผ์–ด, ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ๊ทน๋Œ€ํ™”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Endcap cell์˜ ์„ค๊ณ„๋Š” ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ๊ธฐ์ˆ ์  ๊ณ ๋ ค์‚ฌํ•ญ์„ ํฌํ•จํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด, ์…€์˜ ํฌ๊ธฐ, ํ˜•ํƒœ, ์ „๊ธฐ์  ํŠน์„ฑ ๋“ฑ์€ ๋ชจ๋‘ ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์— ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์นฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ endcap cell์„ ์„ค๊ณ„ํ•  ๋•Œ๋Š” ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ์š”์†Œ๋“ค์„ ๋ฉด๋ฐ€ํžˆ ๋ถ„์„ํ•˜๊ณ  ์ตœ์ ํ™”ํ•ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋˜ํ•œ, endcap cell์€ ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ์…€๋“ค๊ณผ์˜ ์ƒํ˜ธ์ž‘์šฉ์„ ๊ณ ๋ คํ•˜์—ฌ ์„ค๊ณ„๋˜์–ด์•ผ ํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋Š” ์ „์ฒด ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ํƒ€์ด๋ฐ ๋ฐ ์ „๋ ฅ ์†Œ๋ชจ์— ์ง์ ‘์ ์ธ ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์นฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

2. Components and Operating Principles

Endcap cell์€ ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋กœ ์ด๋ฃจ์–ด์ ธ ์žˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, ๊ฐ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋Š” ํŠน์ •ํ•œ ๊ธฐ๋Šฅ์„ ์ˆ˜ํ–‰ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ผ๋ฐ˜์ ์œผ๋กœ endcap cell์€ ๋‹ค์Œ๊ณผ ๊ฐ™์€ ์ฃผ์š” ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋กœ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค: ์ž…๋ ฅ ๋‹จ์ž, ์ถœ๋ ฅ ๋‹จ์ž, ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์ „์› ๊ณต๊ธ‰ ์žฅ์น˜. ์ด๋“ค ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ๋Š” ์„œ๋กœ ๊ธด๋ฐ€ํ•˜๊ฒŒ ์ƒํ˜ธ์ž‘์šฉํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ์ „์ฒด ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ์ขŒ์šฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ž…๋ ฅ ๋‹จ์ž๋Š” ์™ธ๋ถ€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ๋ฐ›์•„๋“ค์ด๋Š” ์—ญํ• ์„ ํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ์ถœ๋ ฅ ๋‹จ์ž๋Š” ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌ๋œ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ์™ธ๋ถ€๋กœ ์ „์†กํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ๋Š” ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌํ•˜๋Š” ํ•ต์‹ฌ ์š”์†Œ๋กœ, ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ๋…ผ๋ฆฌ ๊ฒŒ์ดํŠธ์™€ ํŠธ๋žœ์ง€์Šคํ„ฐ๋กœ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ๋˜์–ด ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ๋Š” ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์ง€์—ฐ์„ ์ตœ์†Œํ™”ํ•˜๊ณ , ํƒ€์ด๋ฐ์„ ์กฐ์ •ํ•˜์—ฌ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์ •ํ™•์„ฑ์„ ๋†’์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ๊ธฐ์—ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ „์› ๊ณต๊ธ‰ ์žฅ์น˜๋Š” ํšŒ๋กœ์— ํ•„์š”ํ•œ ์ „๋ ฅ์„ ์ œ๊ณตํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋Š” ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์•ˆ์ •์„ฑ๊ณผ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ์œ ์ง€ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ํ•„์ˆ˜์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Endcap cell์˜ ์ž‘๋™ ์›๋ฆฌ๋Š” ์ฃผ๋กœ ๋‘ ๊ฐ€์ง€ ์ฃผ์š” ๋ฉ”์ปค๋‹ˆ์ฆ˜์— ๊ธฐ๋ฐ˜ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ฒซ์งธ, ์‹ ํ˜ธ ์ „์†ก ๋ฉ”์ปค๋‹ˆ์ฆ˜์€ ์ž…๋ ฅ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๊ฐ€ ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ๋ฅผ ํ†ตํ•ด ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌ๋˜๊ณ , ์ตœ์ข…์ ์œผ๋กœ ์ถœ๋ ฅ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋กœ ๋ณ€ํ™˜๋˜๋Š” ๊ณผ์ •์„ ํฌํ•จํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‘˜์งธ, ์ „๊ธฐ์  ํŠน์„ฑ ์กฐ์ • ๋ฉ”์ปค๋‹ˆ์ฆ˜์€ ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์ „์•• ๋ฐ ์ „๋ฅ˜ ํŠน์„ฑ์„ ์กฐ์ ˆํ•˜์—ฌ, ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์™œ๊ณก ๋ฐ ๋ฐ˜์‚ฌ๋ฅผ ์ตœ์†Œํ™”ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์ค‘์ ์„ ๋‘ก๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ์™€ ์ž‘๋™ ์›๋ฆฌ๋Š” endcap cell์ด ๋””์ง€ํ„ธ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์ด์œ ๋ฅผ ์„ค๋ช…ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ๋ณต์žก์„ฑ์ด ์ฆ๊ฐ€ํ•จ์— ๋”ฐ๋ผ, endcap cell์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ํ’ˆ์งˆ์„ ๋ณด์žฅํ•˜๊ณ , ์ „์ฒด ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ์ตœ์ ํ™”ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ํ•„์ˆ˜์ ์ธ ์—ญํ• ์„ ์ˆ˜ํ–‰ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

2.1 Internal Circuitry

Endcap cell์˜ ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ๋Š” ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ ๊ฐœ์˜ ๋…ผ๋ฆฌ ๊ฒŒ์ดํŠธ์™€ ํŠธ๋žœ์ง€์Šคํ„ฐ๋กœ ๊ตฌ์„ฑ๋˜์–ด ์žˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋“ค์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ํ•„์š”ํ•œ ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ๊ธฐ๋Šฅ์„ ์ˆ˜ํ–‰ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด, AND, OR, NOT ๊ฒŒ์ดํŠธ๋Š” ๊ธฐ๋ณธ์ ์ธ ๋…ผ๋ฆฌ ์—ฐ์‚ฐ์„ ์ˆ˜ํ–‰ํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ํ”Œ๋ฆฝํ”Œ๋กญ๊ณผ ๊ฐ™์€ ๋ฉ”๋ชจ๋ฆฌ ์š”์†Œ๋Š” ์‹ ํ˜ธ๋ฅผ ์ €์žฅํ•˜๊ณ  ํƒ€์ด๋ฐ์„ ์กฐ์ •ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์„ค๊ณ„๋Š” ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ์ „์ฒด ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ๊ฒฐ์ •์ง“๋Š” ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์š”์†Œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Endcap cell์€ ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ ๊ด€๋ จ ๊ธฐ์ˆ ๊ณผ ๋น„๊ตํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, ๊ฐ ๊ธฐ์ˆ ์€ ๊ณ ์œ ํ•œ ์žฅ์ ๊ณผ ๋‹จ์ ์„ ๊ฐ€์ง€๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด, buffer cell๊ณผ์˜ ๋น„๊ต์—์„œ, buffer cell์€ ์ฃผ๋กœ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ๊ฐ•๋„๋ฅผ ๋†’์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋˜์ง€๋งŒ, endcap cell์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์•ˆ์ •์„ฑ์„ ๋ณด์žฅํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์ค‘์ ์„ ๋‘ก๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. Buffer cell์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์ „์†ก ๊ฑฐ๋ฆฌ๋ฅผ ๋Š˜๋ฆฌ๋Š” ๋ฐ ์œ ์šฉํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ, endcap cell์€ ํšŒ๋กœ์˜ ๋๋ถ€๋ถ„์—์„œ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ์™œ๊ณก์„ ์ค„์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ๋” ํšจ๊ณผ์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๋˜ํ•œ, decap cell๊ณผ ๋น„๊ตํ•  ๋•Œ, decap cell์€ ์ „๋ ฅ ๊ณต๊ธ‰์˜ ์•ˆ์ •์„ฑ์„ ๋†’์ด๋Š” ๋ฐ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋˜๋ฉฐ, endcap cell์€ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ํ’ˆ์งˆ์„ ์œ ์ง€ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์ค‘์ ์„ ๋‘ก๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. Decap cell์€ ์ „๋ ฅ ํ”ผํฌ๋ฅผ ํก์ˆ˜ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์œ ์šฉํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ, endcap cell์€ ํƒ€์ด๋ฐ ๋ฌธ์ œ๋ฅผ ํ•ด๊ฒฐํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ๋” ์ ํ•ฉํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๋น„๊ต๋ฅผ ํ†ตํ•ด, endcap cell์€ ๊ณ ์† ๋””์ง€ํ„ธ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ํ•„์ˆ˜์ ์ธ ์š”์†Œ์ž„์„ ์•Œ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์‹ค์ œ๋กœ, ๋งŽ์€ ํ˜„๋Œ€ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ๋Š” endcap cell์„ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•˜์—ฌ ์„ฑ๋Šฅ์„ ๊ทน๋Œ€ํ™”ํ•˜๊ณ , ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ํ’ˆ์งˆ์„ ๋ณด์žฅํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ์ฃผ๋ ฅํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๊ธฐ์ˆ ๋“ค์€ ์„œ๋กœ ๋ณด์™„์ ์ธ ๊ด€๊ณ„๋ฅผ ๊ฐ€์ง€๊ณ  ์žˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, ์ตœ์ ์˜ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„๋ฅผ ์œ„ํ•ด์„œ๋Š” ์ด๋“ค ๊ธฐ์ˆ ์„ ์ ์ ˆํžˆ ์กฐํ•ฉํ•˜์—ฌ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์ค‘์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

4. References

  • IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
  • ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
  • Semiconductors Industry Association (SIA)
  • Various semiconductor design companies focusing on VLSI technology.

5. One-line Summary

Endcap cell์€ ๋””์ง€ํ„ธ ํšŒ๋กœ ์„ค๊ณ„์—์„œ ์‹ ํ˜ธ์˜ ํ’ˆ์งˆ๊ณผ ์•ˆ์ •์„ฑ์„ ๋ณด์žฅํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์—ญํ• ์„ ํ•˜๋Š” VLSI ๊ตฌ์„ฑ ์š”์†Œ์ด๋‹ค.