Adaptive timing for analysis of skew tolerance

This paper presents an adaptive timing framework for analysis of skew tolerance in high-performance synchronous integrated circuits. The proposed adaptive timing framework models practical deskew schemes as an adaptive system and employs the adaptive processing theory to investigate potential solutions and design constraints of deskew operation. Employing the adaptive timing framework, we determine the statistical properties of optimal deskew, which can be considered as the theoretical limit of skew tolerance. We also quantify the performance of practical deskew schemes and compare the performance gap with optimal deskew. Simulation results reveal that the performance of practical deskew schemes in 90-nm process is 24.3% away from optimal deskew