PushPull: Short Path Padding for Timing Error Resilient Circuits

摘要

Modern IC designs are exposed to a wide range of dynamic variations. Traditionally, a conservative timing guardband is required to guarantee correct operations under the worst-case variation, thus leading to performance degradation. To remove the guardband, resilient circuits are proposed. However, the short path padding (hold time fixing) problem in resilient circuits is severer than conventional IC design. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the short path padding problem to enable the timing error detection and correction mechanism of resilient circuits. Unlike recent prior work adopts greedy heuristics with a local view, we determine the padding values and locations with a global view. Moreover, we propose coarse-grained and fine-grained padding allocation methods to further achieve the derived padding values at physical implementation. Experimental results show that our method is promising to validate timing error resilient circuits.