Design for Performance Reduce CL– Internal diffusion capacitance of the gate itself• keep the drain diffusion as small as possible– Interconnect capacitance– Fanout Increase W/L ratio of the transistor– The most powerful and effective performance optimization tool in the hands of the designer– Watch out for self-loading! – when the intrinsic capacitance dominates the extrinsic load Increase VDD– Can trade-off energy for performance– Increasing VDD above a certain level yields only very minimal improvements– Reliability concerns enforce a firm upper bound on VDD