Clock period optimaization by gate sizing and path sensitization

게미트 사이징과 감작 경로를 이용한 클럭 주기 최적화 기법

In the circuit model that outputs are latched and input vectors are successively applied at inputs, the gate resizing approach to reduce the delay of the critical pathe may not improve the performance. Since the clock period is etermined by delays of both long and short paths in combinational circuits, the performance (clock period) can be optimized by decreasing the delay of the longest path, or increasing the delay of the shortest path. In order to achieve the desired clock period of a circuit, gates lying in sensitizable long and short paths can be selected for resizing. However, the gate selection in path sensitization approach is a difficult problem due to the fact that resizing a gate in shortest path may change the longest sensitizable path and viceversa. For feasible settings of the clock period, new algorithms and corresponding gate selection methods for resizing are proposed in this paper. Our new gate selection methods prevent the delay of the longest path from increasing while resizing a gate in the shortest path and prevent the delay of the shortest path from decreasing while resizing a gate in the longest sensitizable path. As a result, each resizing step is guaranteed not to increase the clock period. Our algorithmsare teted on ISCAS85 benchmark circuits and experimental results show that the clock period can beoptimized efficiently with out gate selection methods.