A circuit in which clock is not necessarily distributed to all registers simultaneously, called a semi-synchronous circuit, leads to higher frequency or smaller clock tree of the circuit compared with a synchronous circuit. In this paper, we propose a semi-synchronous design method which modifies the clock tree of a complete synchronous circuit. The proposed method is easy to incorporate with conventional design systems. We designed a semi-synchronous processor by the proposed design method. The designed processor achieves higher frequency than the original circuit. The time to modify the original circuit to the semi-synchronous circuit is within one hour. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed.
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