Title :
A practical method for multi-domain clock skew optimization
Author :
Zhi, Yanling ; Zhou, Hai ; Zeng, Xuan
Author_Institution :
Microelectron. Dept., Fudan Univ., Shanghai, China
Abstract :
Clock skew scheduling is an effective technique in performance optimization of sequential circuits. However, with process variations, it becomes more difficult to reliably implement a wide spectrum of clock delays at the registers. Multidomain clock skew scheduling is a good option to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose a practical method to efficiently and optimally solve this problem. A framework based on branch-and-bound is carefully designed to search for the optimal clocking domain assignment, and a greedy clustering algorithm is developed to quickly estimate the upper bound of cycle period for a given branch. Experiment results on ISCAS89 sequential benchmarks show both the optimality and efficiency of our method compared with previous works.
Keywords :
clocks; delays; scheduling; sequential circuits; tree searching; clock delay; greedy clustering algorithm; multidomain clock skew optimization; multidomain clock skew scheduling; optimal clocking domain assignment; sequential circuit; Clocks; Clustering algorithms; Merging; Optimization; Registers; Timing; Upper bound;
Conference_Titel :
Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), 2011 16th Asia and South Pacific
Conference_Location :
Yokohama
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-7515-5
DOI :
10.1109/ASPDAC.2011.5722245