But one thing kept hitting him with the vast majority of the entries: decoupling capacitors were missing from the circuits. If you’ve worked with microcontrollers or digital logic chips you prob ...

Most ICs need to be decoupled from their power supply, usually with a 0.1uF capacitor between each power pin and ground. Decoupling is usually used to remove noise and to smooth power fluctuations.

This type of standard cell library is called Tap-Less library ... Fig 5: Standard Cell Placement before Decoupling Capacitor/Filler Addition After the standard cells (for logic implementation) are ...