MeshWorks: An efficient framework for planning, synthesis and optimization of clock mesh networks

Abstract

A leaf-level clock mesh is known to be very tolerant to variations (Restle et al., 2001). However, its use is limited to a few high-end designs because of the high power/resource requirements and lack of automatic mesh synthesis tools. Most existing works on clock mesh (Restle et al., 2001) either deal with semi-custom design or perform optimizations on a given clock mesh. However, the problem of obtaining a good initial clock mesh has not been addressed. Similarly, the problem of achieving a smooth tradeoff between skew and power/resources has not been addressed adequately. In this work, we present MeshWorks, the first comprehensive automated framework for planning, synthesis and optimization of clock mesh networks with the objective of addressing the above issues. Experimental results suggest that our algorithms can achieve an additional reduction of 26% in buffer area, 19% in wirelength and 18% in power, compared to the recent work of Venkataraman et al., (2006) with similar worst case maximum frequency under variation.