Novel Register Sharing in Datapath for Structural Robustness against Delay Variation

Keisuke INOUE  Mineo KANEKO  Tsuyoshi IWAGAKI 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E91-A  No.4  pp.1044-1053
Publication Date: 2008/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Selected Papers from the 20th Workshop on Circuits and Systems in Karuizawa)
Category: 
Keyword: 
datapath synthesis,  delay variation,  register assignment,  setup and hold constraints, 

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Summary: 
As the feature size of VLSI becomes smaller, delay variations become a serious problem in VLSI. In this paper, we propose a novel class of robustness for a datapath against delay variations, which is named structural robustness against delay variation (SRV), and propose sufficient conditions for a datapath to have SRV. A resultant circuit designed under these conditions has a larger timing margin to delay variations than previous designs without sacrificing effective computation time. In addition, under any degree of delay variations, we can always find an available clock frequency for a datapath having SRV property to operate correctly, which could be a preferable characteristic in IP-based design.