Clock Tree Aware Post-Global Placement Optimization

Abstract

Power consumption is one of the key optimization objectives for modern integrated circuit designs. More than 40% of the total power consumption is contributed by clock trees due to their high frequency of switching and high capacitance. In the traditional physical design flow, placement is done before clock tree synthesis (CTS). CTS constructs a tree to connect the clock source with all the registers. Therefore, optimization of clock trees is limited by the quality of register placement. This paper proposes a post-global placement optimization procedure that integrates a fast three stage CTS method based on modified k-means clustering technique into a global placer. The fast three stage CTS constructs a virtual clock tree to guide global placement to favor CTS. Then a multi-level clock net contractive force according to the virtual clock tree is inserted to optimize register locations for reducing the clock tree wirelength. The experimental results show that the proposed optimization approach can reduce both the clock tree wirelength and clock net switching power at the cost of slight increase in half perimeter wirelength (HPWL).