Title
End-to-End Industrial Study of Retiming
Abstract
Sequential circuits are combinational circuits that are separated by registers. Retiming is considered as the most promising technique for optimizing sequential circuits, that involves moving the edge-triggered registers across the combinational logic without changing the functionality. Despite significant efforts spent on sequential optimization since 1980's, there are few works? discussed its performance in an end-to-end design flow. The retiming algorithms were mostly evaluated at the logic level. However, it turns out that the retiming results at logic level could be significantly different than evaluating the physical level. This paper provides the findings of how retiming algorithms perform in an end-to-end industrial design flow, with seven industry designs taken from a recent 14nm microprocessor. Experiments are conducted with several complete industrial design flows. The evaluations are made at the end of the physical design flow. The experimental results show that the performance (design quality) of the retiming algorithms vary on the designs. Based these experimental results, we discover a feature that describes the retiming potentials of sequential designs. This model successfully forecast whether the given industrial designs could be significantly improved by retiming in an end-to-end design flow, regarding timing, area, and power.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ISVLSI.2018.00046
2018 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Sequential optimization,retiming,physical design,retiming prediction
Retiming,Logic gate,Sequential logic,Computer science,Microprocessor,Combinational logic,Design flow,Logic level,Physical design,Computer engineering
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2159-3469
978-1-5386-7100-9
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
10
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cunxi Yu1989.64
Chau-Chin Huang2695.88
Gi-Joon Nam3101466.51
Mihir R. Choudhury418415.40
Victor N. Kravets512411.78
Andrew Sullivan631.45
Maciej J. Ciesielski762974.80
Giovanni De Micheli8102451018.13