doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.0080

ABSTRACT

The clock tree network can consume up to 40% of the power budget and is one of the limiting factors for realizing low power designs. This paper presents a novel clock transition time optimization based low power clock tree synthesis, for the non-throughput constraint designs. The proposed methodology quantifies the dependence of short circuit and switching power of the buffers on the input clock transition time, with the newly defined “weighted current strength” parameter. The reduction in the weighted current strength parameter value directly maps into the reduction in the total dynamic power of the clock tree. The proposed methodology determines the transition time constraint values for the clock signals which result in the minimum weighted current strength for the synthesized clock tree network. This technique results in up to 34% reduction in the dynamic power of the clock tree network with the existing clock tree synthesis tools and the clock tree library.

Keywords: Weighted current strength, Short circuit power, Switching power, Clock tree network, Transition time.

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