Area optimization of resilient designs guided by a mixed integer geometric program.

Timing resilient designs can remove variation margins by adding error detecting logic (EDL) that detects timing errors when execution completes within a resiliency window. Speeding up near-critical-paths during logic synthesis can reduce the amount of EDL needed but at the cost of increasing logic area. This creates a logic optimization strategy called resynthesis. This paper proposes a gate-sizing based mixed integer geometric programming framework to analytically model and optimize paths during resynthesis. We evaluate our approach on a set of ISCAS89 benchmarks and compare the overall area improvement after resynthesis guided by our mathematical model versus a previously published naive brute-force approach. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves up to 11% larger average area improvement.