Migration: a new technique to improve synthesized designs through incremental customization

A novel technique to explore the performance vs. design effort trade-off is proposed. Starting from an optimally synthesized design, performance-critical cells are incrementally and optimally selected and custom-sized to generate this trade-off. Efficient algorithms for the optimal selection, and for improving the reuse of custom-sized cells in the design are given. Significant performance gains are shown in several real circuits through the addition of very few customized cells.