Statistical Analysis of Clock Skew Variation in H-Tree Structure

Masanori HASHIMOTO
Tomonori YAMAMOTO
Hidetoshi ONODERA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E88-A    No.12    pp.3375-3381
Publication Date: 2005/12/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e88-a.12.3375
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Prediction and Analysis
Keyword: 
clock skew,  manufacturing variability,  environmental variability,  transition time constraint,  statistical analysis,  clock distribution,  

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Summary: 
This paper discusses clock skew due to manufacturing variability and environmental change. In clock tree design, transition time constraint is an important design parameter that controls clock skew and power dissipation. In this paper, we evaluate clock skew under several variability models, and demonstrate relationship among clock skew, transition time constraint and power dissipation. Experimental results show that constraint of small transition time reduces clock skew under manufacturing and supply voltage variabilities, whereas there is an optimum constraint value for temperature gradient. Our experiments in a 0.18 µm technology indicate that clock skew is minimized when clock buffer is sized such that the ratio of output and input capacitance is four.


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