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Statistical clock tree routing for robustness to process variations

Published: 09 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Advances in VLSI technology make clock skew more susceptible to process variations. Notwithstanding efficient zero skew routing algorithms, clock skew still limits post-manufacturing performance. Process-induced skew presents an ever-growing limitation for high speed, large area clock networks. To achieve multi-GHz operation for high-end designs, clock networks must be constructed to tolerate variations in various interconnect parameters. We propose statistical centering based clock routing algorithm built upon DME that greatly improves skew tolerance to interconnect variations. The algorithm achieves the improvement by: i) choosing the best center measure which is dynamically based on the first three moments of the skew distribution, and ii) designing for all sink pairs in the subtrees simultaneously. In addition, a variation aware abstract topology generation algorithm is proposed in this paper. Experiments on benchmark circuits demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in reducing the number of skew violations by 12%-37%.

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Cited By

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  • (2010)Clock skew optimization considering complicated power modesProceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe10.5555/1870926.1871280(1474-1479)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2010
  • (2010)Clock skew optimization considering complicated power modes2010 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2010)10.1109/DATE.2010.5457044(1474-1479)Online publication date: Mar-2010
  • (2008)Synergistic physical synthesis for manufacturability and variability in 45nm designs and beyondProceedings of the 2008 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/1356802.1356860(220-225)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2008
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cover image ACM Conferences
ISPD '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Physical design
April 2006
232 pages
ISBN:1595932992
DOI:10.1145/1123008
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 09 April 2006

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Author Tags

  1. clock tree
  2. process variations
  3. robustness
  4. routing

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ISPD06
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ISPD06: International Symposium on Physical Design 2006
April 9 - 12, 2006
California, San Jose, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 62 of 172 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2010)Clock skew optimization considering complicated power modesProceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe10.5555/1870926.1871280(1474-1479)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2010
  • (2010)Clock skew optimization considering complicated power modes2010 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2010)10.1109/DATE.2010.5457044(1474-1479)Online publication date: Mar-2010
  • (2008)Synergistic physical synthesis for manufacturability and variability in 45nm designs and beyondProceedings of the 2008 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/1356802.1356860(220-225)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2008
  • (2008)Robust Clock Tree Routing in the Presence of Process VariationsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2008.92577627:8(1385-1397)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2008
  • (2008)Layer assignment considering manufacturability in X-architecture clock tree2008 8th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology10.1109/CIT.2008.4594790(880-885)Online publication date: Jul-2008
  • (2008)Synergistic physical synthesis for manufacturability and variability in 45nm designs and beyond2008 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.1109/ASPDAC.2008.4483945(220-225)Online publication date: Jan-2008
  • (2008)Design for manufacturing meets advanced process control: A surveyJournal of Process Control10.1016/j.jprocont.2008.04.00718:10(975-984)Online publication date: Dec-2008
  • (2007)Minimal skew clock embedding considering time variant temperature gradientProceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Physical design10.1145/1231996.1232036(173-180)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2007

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