Clock Network Synthesis

Prof. Shiyan Hu shiyan@mtu.edu Office: EREC 731

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Outline
Introduction H-tree Zero skew clock DME and its extension New trends

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Introduction
For synchronized designs, data transfer between functional elements are synchronized by clock signals Clock signal are generated externally (e.g., by PLL) Clock period equation

clock period td + tskew + tsu

td: Longest path through combinational logic tskew: Clock skew tsu: Setup time of the synchronizing elements

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Clock Skew
Clock skew is the maximum difference in the arrival time of a clock signal at two different components. Clock skew forces designers to use a large time period between clock pulses. This makes the system slower. So, in addition to other objectives, clock skew should be minimized during clock routing.

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Clock Design Problem

What are the main concerns for clock design? Skew
No. 1 concern for clock networks For increased clock frequency, skew may contribute over 10% of the system cycle time

Power
very important, as clock is a major power consumer It switches at every clock cycle

Noise
Clock is often a very strong aggressor May need shielding

Delay
Not really important But slew rate is important (sharp transition)
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The Clock Routing Problem

Given a source and n sinks. Connect all sinks to the source by an interconnect tree so as to minimize:
Clock Skew = maxi,j |ti - tj| Delay = maxi ti Total wirelength Noise and coupling effect

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Clock Design Considerations

Clock signal is global in nature, so clock nets are usually very long.
Significant interconnect capacitance and resistance

So what are the techniques?

Routing
Clock tree versus clock clock mesh (grid) Balance skew and total wire length

Buffer insertion
Clock buffers to reduce clock skew, delay, and distortion in waveform.

Wire sizing
To further tune the clock tree/mesh

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Clock trees
A path from the clock source to clock sinks Clock Source

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Clock trees
A path from the clock source to clock sinks Clock Source

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H-tree Algorithm
Minimize skew by making interconnections to subunits equal in length
Regular pattern

Can be used when terminals are evenly distributed

However, this is never the case in practice So strict (pure) H-trees are rarely used However, still popular for top-level clock network design Cons: too costly is used everywhere

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A Zero Skew Algorithm

Use Elmore delay model to compute delay Try to minimize wire length, but not done very well
Lots of follow up works to minimize total wire length while maintaining zero skew DME and its extensions

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An Exact Zero Skew Algorithm [Tsay93]

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A Zero Skew Algorithm [Tsay91]

This paper built the foundation for zero skew Its principal can also be used to do prescribed skew (just solve a slightly different delay equation with nonzero skew) However, its merging is kind of simple May have too much total wire length

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Deferred Merge Embedding

As its name implies, DME defers the merging as late as possible, to make sure minimal wire length cost for merging Independently proposed by several groups
Edahiro, NEC Res Dev, 1991 Chao et al, DAC92 Boese and Kahng, ASIC92

DME needs an abstract routing topology as the input It has a bottom-up phase followed by a top-down process

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Bottom Up Phase
Each node v has a merging segment ms(v). A merging segment is a Manhattan arc Manhattan arc: has slope +/- 1 or has zero length (could be a point). tiled rectangular region (TRR): The collection of points within a fixed distance from a Manhattan arc. The intersection of two TRRs is a TRR Merging segments are always Manhattan arcs

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DME Wrapup
[Boese and Kahng, ASIC92]
DME is guaranteed to find the minimum wire length with zero skew under the linear delay model Need to have an abstract routing graph to start with

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Modification: Bounded Skew

Instead of choosing merging segments as in DME, choose merging region of v, mr(v) Maintains skew bound Use boundary merging and embedding which considers merging points lying on the nearest boundary segments of mr(a) and mr(b)

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Topology Generation
One common approach
Balanced and geometry guided Top down-partitioning that recursively divide the set of sinks, using alternating horizontal and vertical cuts The balance bipartition heuristic generates a topology that recursively divides the set of sinks into two subsets with equal total loading capacitance

Balanced tree versus unbalanced tree? Geometric versus capacitive load?

[Chaturvedi and Hu, ICCD03] has good survey of recent works Abstract topology not just geometric, but also capacitive load, with prescribed skew
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Trend
Clock skew scheduling together with clock tree synthesis
Schedule the timing slack of a circuit to the individual registers for optimal performance and as a second criteria to increase the robustness of the implementation w.r.t. process variation.

Variability is a major concern Non-tree clock, mixed mesh/tree?

How to analyze it? The task is to investigate a combined optimization for clock skew scheduling and clock tree synthesis such that any unintentional clock skew is maximally compensated by a corresponding slack at the registers.
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(P. Restle)

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