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SHIH-HSU HUANG, CHUN-HUA CHENG AND SONG-BIN PAN
Department of Electronic Engineering
Chung Yuan Christian University
Chungli, 320 Taiwan
E-mail: {shhuang; g9402601; g9576042}@cycu.edu.tw
As device dimensions shrink to deep sub-micron ranges, the hot-carrier effect is a
main concern for the long-term reliability. It is known that the delay degradation (induced
by the hot-carrier effect) of a logic gate is linearly proportional to the number of
output switching activities. Due to the clock gating design, the clock gates often have
different active probabilities, which lead to different delay degradations. The difference
among the delay degradations of clock paths results in an additional clock skew, called
aging skew. Based on that observation, in this paper, we present the first attempt, called
anti-aging clock gating (AACG), for the synthesis of gated clock designs with the aging
skew considered. Given a constraint on the power consumption, the objective of our
AACG is to minimize the aging skew (by equalizing the delay degradations of clock
paths as possible). Two integer linear programs (ILP) are proposed to formally draw up
our AACG problem in the register-transfer-level (RTL) synthesis stage and the high-level
synthesis stage, respectively. Compared with previous works, benchmark data show that
our approach can greatly reduce the aging skew without any penalty on the power consumption.
Received August 18, 2008; revised December 3, 2008 & March 9, 2009; accepted April 16, 2009.
Communicated by Yao-Wen Chang.
* This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., under contract No. NSC
97-2221-E-033-053-MY3.