Clock Scheduling and Cell Library Information Utilization for Power Supply Noise Reduction

Power supply noise is fundamentally caused by large current peaks. Since large current peaks are induced by simultaneous switching of many circuit elements, power supply noise can be minimized by deliberate clock scheduling which utilizes nonzero clock skew. In this paper, nonzero skew clock scheduling is used to avoid the large peak current and consequently reduce power supply noise. While previous approaches require extra characterization efforts to acquire current waveform of a circuit, we approximate it only with existing cell library information to be easily adapted to conventional design flow. A simulated annealing based algorithm is performed, and the peak current values are estimated for feasible clock schedules found by the algorithm. The clock schedule with the minimum peak current is selected for a solution. Experimental results on ISCAS89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the peak current.