Scalable Analysis of Mesh-Based Clock Distribution Networks Using Application-Specific Reduced Order Modeling

Clock meshes possess inherent low clock skews and excellent immunity to process-voltage-temperature variations, and have increasingly found their way to high-performance integrated circuit designs. However, analysis of such massively coupled networks is significantly hindered by the sheer size of the network and tight coupling between non-tree interconnects and large numbers of clock drivers. While the SPICE simulation of large clock meshes is often intractable, standard interconnect model order reduction algorithms also fail due to the large number of input/output ports introduced by clock drivers. The presented approach is motivated by the key observation of the steady-state operation of the clock networks while its efficiency is facilitated by exploring new clock-mesh specific harmonic-weighted model order reduction algorithm and locality analysis via port sliding. The scalability of the analysis is significantly improved by eliminating the need for computing infeasible multi-port passive reduced order interconnect models with large port count and decomposing the overall task into very tractable and naturally parallelizable model generation and fast Fourier transform/inverse-fast Fourier transform operations, all on a per driver or per sink basis. We demonstrate the application of our approach by feasibly analyzing large clock meshes with excellent accuracy.