Abstract

In the design of high performance VLSI systems, minimization of clock skew is an increasingly important objective. Additionally, wirelength of clock routing trees should be minimized in order to reduce system power requirements and deformation of the clock pulse at the synchronizing elements of the system. In this paper, we present the Deferred-Merge Embedding (DME) algorithm, which in linear time embeds any given connection topology into the Manhattan plane to create a clock tree with zero skew while minimizing total wirelength. Extensive experimental results show that the algorithm yields exact zero skew trees with 9% to 16% wirelength reduction over previous constructions [5] [6]. The DME algorithm may be applied to either the Elmore or the linear delay model, and yields optimal total wirelength for linear delay. 1 Introduction In synchronous VLSI designs, circuit speed is increasingly limited by clock skew, which is the maximum difference in arrival times of the clocking signal ...

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