PushPull: Short-Path Padding for Timing Error Resilient Circuits

Abstract

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 far 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 utilize spare cells and a dummy metal to further achieve the derived padding values at physical implementation. Experimental results show that our method is promising to validate timing error-resilient circuits.