A Formal Approach to Optimal Register Binding with Ordered Clocking for Clock-Skew Tolerant Datapaths

摘要

The impact of clock-skew on circuit timing increases rapidly as technology scales. As a result, it becomes important to deal with clock-skew at the early stages of circuit designs. This paper presents a novel datapath design that aims at mitigating the impact of clock-skew in high-level synthesis, by integrating margin (evaluated as the maximum number of clock-cycles to absorb clock-skew) and ordered clocking into high-level synthesis tasks. As a first attempt to the proposed datapath design, this paper presents a 0-1 integer linear programming formulation that focuses on register binding to achieve the minimum cost (the minimum number of registers) under given scheduling result. Experimental results show the optimal results can be obtained without increasing the latency, and with a few extra registers compared to traditional high-level synthesis design.