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WaveMin: a fine-grained clock buffer polarity assignment combined with buffer sizing

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The clock buffer polarity assignment is one of the effective design schemes to mitigate the power/ground noise caused by the clock signal propagation. This work overcomes two fundamental limitations of the conventional clock buffer polarity assignment methods, which are (1) the unawareness of the signal delay (i.e., arrival time) differences to the leaf buffering elements and (2) the ignorance of the effect of the current fluctuation of non-leaf buffering elements on the total peak current waveform. Clearly, not addressing (1) and (2) in polarity assignment may cause a severe inaccuracy on the peak current estimation, which results in unnecessarily high peak current. To overcome the limitations, we propose a completely new fine-grained approach to the clock buffer polarity assignment combined with buffer sizing, formulating the problem into a multi-objective shortest path problem and solving it effectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to produce designs with 17% lower peak current and 20% lower power noise on average compared the results produced by the best ever known method.

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  • (2011)Clock design techniques considering circuit reliability2011 International SoC Design Conference10.1109/ISOCC.2011.6138667(142-145)Online publication date: Nov-2011

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  1. WaveMin: a fine-grained clock buffer polarity assignment combined with buffer sizing

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        DAC '11: Proceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference
        June 2011
        1055 pages
        ISBN:9781450306362
        DOI:10.1145/2024724
        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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        Published: 05 June 2011

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        1. buffer sizing
        2. polarity assignment
        3. power/ground noise

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        • (2011)Clock design techniques considering circuit reliability2011 International SoC Design Conference10.1109/ISOCC.2011.6138667(142-145)Online publication date: Nov-2011

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