Post-Silicon Tuning Based on Flexible Flip-Flop Timing

Clock skew scheduling is one of the essential steps to be carefully performed during the design process. This work addresses the clock skew optimization problem integrated with the consideration of the inter-dependent relation between the setup and hold times, and clock to-Q delay of flip-flops, so that the time margin is more accurately and reliably set aside over that of the previous methods, which have never taken the integrated problem into account. Precisely, based on an accurate flexible model of setup time, hold time, and clock-to-Q delay, we propose a stepwise clock skew scheduling technique in which at each iteration, the worst slack of setup and hold times is systematically and incrementally relaxed to maximally extend the time margin. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown through experiments with benchmark circuits, demonstrating that our method relaxes the worst slack of circuits, so that the clock period ($T_{clk}$) is shortened by 4.2% on average, namely the clock speed is improved from 369 MHz~2.23 GHz to 385 MHz~2.33 GHz with no time violation. In addition, it reduces the total numbers of setup and hold time violations by 27.7%, 9.5%, and 6.7% when the clock periods are set to 95%, 90%, and 85% of the value of Tclk, respectively.