A Fine-Grained Clock Buffer Polarity Assignment for High-Speed and Low-Power Digital Systems

The clock buffer polarity assignment is one of the effective design schemes to mitigate the power/ground noise caused by the clock signal propagation in high-speed digital systems. This paper overcomes a set of fundamental limitations of the conventional clock buffer polarity assignment methods, which are: 1) the unawareness of the signal delay (i.e., arrival time) differences to the leaf clock buffering elements; 2) the ignorance of the effect of the current fluctuation of nonleaf clock buffering elements on the total peak current waveform; and 3) the inability of supporting low-power digital designs with multiple (dynamically operating) power modes. Clearly, not addressing 1 and 2 in the polarity assignment may cause a severe inaccuracy on the peak current estimation, which results in unnecessarily high peak current. Moreover, without tackling 3, designs may suffer from clock skew violation in some of the power modes, affecting circuit speed or reliability. To overcome the limitations, we propose a completely new fine-grained approach to the clock buffer polarity assignment combined with buffer sizing, formulating the problem into a multiobjective shortest path problem and solving it effectively for designs with a single power mode, while exploiting the flexibility of our multiobjective shortest path formulation for designs with multiple power modes. Through experiments using benchmark circuits, it is shown that the proposed approach is able to produce designs with 17% lower peak current and 20% lower power noise on average, compared with the results produced by the best ever known method.