A practical method for multi-domain clock skew optimization

Abstract

Clock skew scheduling is an effective technique in performance optimization of sequential circuits. However, with process variations, it becomes more difficult to reliably implement a wide spectrum of clock delays at the registers. Multidomain clock skew scheduling is a good option to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose a practical method to efficiently and optimally solve this problem. A framework based on branch-and-bound is carefully designed to search for the optimal clocking domain assignment, and a greedy clustering algorithm is developed to quickly estimate the upper bound of cycle period for a given branch. Experiment results on ISCAS89 sequential benchmarks show both the optimality and efficiency of our method compared with previous works.