A sliding window scheme for accurate clock mesh analysis

Mesh architectures are used for distributing critical global signals on a chip such as clock and power/ground. The inherent redundancy created by loops present in the mesh smooths out undesirable variations between signal nodes spatially distributed over the chip. However, one outstanding problem with mesh architectures is the difficulty in analyzing them with sufficient accuracy. In this paper, we present a new sliding window-based scheme to analyze the latency in clock meshes. We show that for small meshes, our scheme comes within 1% of the SPICE simulation of the complete mesh with respect to clock latency. Our scheme is ideally suited for distributed- or grid-computing. We show large design instances where SPICE could not finish, whereas our scheme could complete the analysis in less than 2 hours.