A variation-adaptive retiming method exploiting reconfigurability

Abstract

In this article we present a variation-aware post placement and routing (P&R) retiming method to counteract process variation in FPGAs. Variation-aware retiming takes into account exact variation maps (measured on FPGAs) as opposed to statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) which models process variation with statistical distributions. Experiments are conducted using variation maps measured from 100 Cyclone III FPGAs, and the retiming algorithm is applied using MATLAB. We have shown that for circuits with several retiming choices of equivalent logic depth, up to 30% delay improvement can be achieved for a given variation coefficient of σ/μ = 0.3.