Enabling adaptability through elastic clocks

Power and performance benefits of scaling are lost to worst case margins as uncertainty of device characteristics is increasing. Adaptive techniques can dynamically adjust the margins required to tolerate variability and recover a significant part of the benefits lost due to worst-case conditions. Additionally, the stringent timing requirements for the synthesis of low-skew clock trees involve higher power consumption, and limit the adaptability to varying operating conditions. This paper introduces an elastic clocking scheme as an adaptive technique to confront variability and provide substantial power savings by dynamically adjusting to operating conditions. The synthesis and sign-off analysis of the elastic clocks is fully automated. Changes to the design flow and sign-off analysis of elastic clocks are addressed by automation of design flow support.