Operation scheduling considering time borrowing for high-performance latch-based circuits

Recently, latch-based design has attracted attention due to its several merits. Time borrowing is one feature of latches, where a slower functional unit can borrow timing slacks from a faster functional unit. This paper shows that latency can be reduced by integrating the time borrowing into operation scheduling in latch-based design. Specifically, continuous execution delay model is adapted to operation scheduling, and design conditions based on this model are presented. A list scheduling-based algorithm is proposed to solve the minimum-latency resource-constrained scheduling problem. Experiments demonstrate the latency reduction with an average of 11% compared to the conventional design.