Ultra-fast interconnect driven cell cloning for minimizing critical path delay
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
5-19-2010
Abstract
In a complete physical synthesis flow, optimization transforms, that can improve the timing on critical paths that are already well-optimized by a series of powerful transforms (timing driven placement, buffering and gate sizing) are invaluable. Finding such a transform is quite challenging, to say nothing of efficiency. This work explores innovative cloning (gate duplication) techniques to improve timing-closure in a physical synthesis environment. With a buffer-aware interconnect timing model, new polynomial-time optimal algorithms are proposed for timing-driven cloning, including both finding optimal sink partitions (identifying the fan-outs) for the original and the duplicated gates, as well as physical locations for both gates. In particular, we present an O(m)-time optimal algorithm to minimize the worst slack if the original gate is movable, and an O(m log m) algorithm if the original gate is fixed, where $m$ is the number of fan-outs. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first one considering the timing-driven cloning problem under a buffer-aware interconnect delay model. For a hundred testcases in 45nm technology node, we demonstrate significant timing improvement due to our cloning techniques as compared to other existing timing-optimization transforms. Extensions to other factors, such as wirelength, FOM and placement obstacles are further discussed. Copyright 2010 ACM.
Publication Title
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Physical Design
Recommended Citation
Li, Z.,
Papa, D.,
Alpert, C.,
Hu, S.,
Shi, W.,
Sze, C.,
&
Zhou, Y.
(2010).
Ultra-fast interconnect driven cell cloning for minimizing critical path delay.
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Physical Design, 75-82.
http://doi.org/10.1145/1735023.1735047
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/12504