Title
Discharge-path-based antenna effect detection and fixing for X-architecture clock tree
Abstract
Antenna effect is a phenomenon in the plasma-based nanometer process and directly influences the manufacturing yield of VLSI circuits. Because antenna-critical metal wires have sufficient charges to damage the thin gate oxides of the clock input ports connected by a clock tree, the standard cells or IPs cannot be driven by the clock source synchronously. For a given X-architecture clock tree that connects n clock sinks, we consider the antenna effect in the clock tree and propose a discharge-path-based antenna effect detection method. To fix the antenna violations, we use the jumper insertion technique recommended by foundries. Furthermore, we integrate the layer assignment technique to reduce the inserted jumper and via counts. Differing from the existing works, the delay of vias is considered in delay calculation, and a wire sizing technique is applied for clock skew compensation after fixing the antenna violations. Experimental results on benchmarks show that our algorithm runs in O(n^2) to averagely insert 48.21% less jumpers and reduce 20.35% in vias compared with other previous algorithms. Moreover, the SPICE simulation further verifies the correctness of the resulting clock tree.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.vlsi.2011.05.002
Integration
Keywords
Field
DocType
n clock sink,discharge path,discharge-path-based antenna effect detection,antenna effect,clock input port,x-architecture clock tree,layer assignment,clock source synchronously,antenna violation,clock tree,jumper insertion,clock skew compensation,resulting clock tree
Delay calculation,Clock gating,Computer science,Clock domain crossing,Electronic engineering,Real-time computing,Synchronous circuit,Clock skew,Antenna effect,Digital clock manager,CPU multiplier
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
45
1
Integration, the VLSI Journal
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chia-chun Tsai110923.04
Chung-chieh Kuo2103.28
Feng-Tzu Hsu310.35
Trong-yen Lee49820.70