False path and clock scheduling based yield-aware gate sizing

Timing margin (slack) needs to be carefully managed to ensure a satisfactory timing yield. We propose a new design flow that combines a false-path-aware gate sizing and a statistical-timing-driven clock scheduling algorithms to maximize timing yield. Our gate sizing algorithm preserves the true path lengths that may otherwise be altered by the traditional gate sizing algorithms due to the presence of false paths. The slack is then distributed to each path according to its path delay uncertainty to maximize the timing yield. Experimental results show that our flow achieves significant timing yield improvements (> 20%) than a traditional flow for a subset of the benchmark circuits with little or negligible area penalty.