EE382V Fall 2006

VLSI Physical Design Automation

Clock and Power Routing

Prof. David Pan

dpan@ece.utexas.edu
Office: ACES 5.434

10/22/08 1
 Routing of Clock and Power Nets
• Different from other signal nets, clock and power are
special routing problems
– For clock nets, need to consider clock skew as well as delay.
– For power nets, need to consider current density (IR drop)
• => specialized routers for these nets.
• Automatic tools for ASICs
• Often manually routed and optimized for
microprocessors, with help from automatic tools

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 Clock Introduction
• For synchronized designs, data transfer between
functional elements are synchronized by clock signals
• Clock signal are generated externally (e.g., by PLL)
• Clock period equation

clock period ≥ td + tskew + tsu + tds

t d: Longest path through combinational logic
tskew: Clock skew
tsu: Setup time of the synchronizing elements
tds: Propagation delay within the synchronizing element

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 Clock Skew
• Clock skew is the maximum difference in the arrival
time of a clock signal at two different components.
• Clock skew forces designers to use a large time period
between clock pulses. This makes the system slower.
• So, in addition to other objectives, clock skew should
be minimized during clock routing.

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 Clock Design Problem
• What are the main concerns for clock design?
• Skew
– No. 1 concern for clock networks
– For increased clock frequency, skew may contribute over 10% of
the system cycle time
• Power
– very important, as clock is a major power consumer!
– It switches at every clock cycle!
• Noise
– Clock is often a very strong aggressor
– May need shielding
• Delay
– Not really important
– But slew rate is important (sharp transition)

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 The Clock Routing Problem

• Given a source and n sinks.

• Connect all sinks to the source by an interconnect
network (tree or non-tree) so as to minimize:
– Clock Skew = maxi,j |ti - tj|
– Delay = maxi ti
– Total wirelength
– Noise and coupling effect

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 Clock Design Considerations
• Clock signal is global in nature, so clock nets are
usually very big
– Significant interconnect capacitance and resistance
• So what are the techniques?
– Routing
• Clock tree versus clock mesh (non-tree or grid)
• Balance skew and total wire length
– Buffer insertion // will be covered in EE382V (Optimization
issues in VLSI CAD) – Fall 2007
• Clock buffers to reduce clock skew, delay, and distortion in waveform.
– Wire sizing // will be covered in Opt. Issues in VLSI CAD
• To further tune the clock tree/mesh

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 Clock trees
• A path from the clock source to clock sinks

Clock Source

FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF

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 Clock trees
• A path from the clock source to clock sinks

Clock Source

FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF

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 H-Tree Clock Routing
Tapping Point

4 Points 16 Points

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 H-tree Algorithm
• Minimize skew by making interconnections to subunits
equal in length
– Regular pattern
– The skew is 0 assuming delay is directly proportional to
wirelength
• Is this always the case???
• Can be used when terminals are evenly distributed
– However, this is never the case in practice (due to blockage,
and so on)
– So strict (pure) H-trees are rarely used
– However, still popular for top-level clock network design
– Cons: too costly to be used everywhere

Can you think of another shape if non-rectilinear wires are allowed?

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 Method of Means and Medians (MMM)
• Applicable when the clock terminals are arbitrarily
arranged.
• Follows a strategy very similar to H-Tree.
• Recursively partition the terminals into two sets of equal
size (median). Then, connect the center of mass of the
whole circuit to the centers of mass of the two sub-circuits
(mean).
• Clock skew is only minimized heuristically. The resulting
tree may not have zero-skew.

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An Example of MMM

centers of mass

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 Geometric Matching Algorithm
(GMA)
• MMM is a top-down algorithm, but GMA is a bottom-up
algorithm.
• Geometric matching of n endpoints:
– Construct a set of n/2 line segments connecting n endpoints
pairwise.
– No two line segments share an endpoint.
– The cost is the sum of the edge lengths.
• The basic idea is to find a minimum cost geometric
matching recursively.
• Time complexity is O(n2.5 log n) for n endpoints.

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 An Example of GMA
Tapping point
(not necessarily
the mid-point)

H-flipping

Apply geometric Post-processing

matching recursively.
Can give clock tree of zero skew. 15
 An Exact Zero Skew Algorithm
• ICCAD 1991 and TCAD 1993, Ren-Song Tsay
• A classic paper to manage clock skew
• Use Elmore delay model to compute delay
• Guarantee zero skew
– Can easily to extended for zero skew or bounded skew
– Can you think of a method to do it?
• Try to minimize wire length, but not done very well
– Lots of follow up works to minimize total wire length while
maintaining zero skew
– DME and its extensions

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 Deferred Merge Embedding

• As its name implies, DME defers the merging as late

as possible, to make sure minimal wire length cost for
merging
• Independently proposed by several groups
– Edahiro, NEC Res Dev, 1991
– Chao et al, DAC’92
– Boese and Kahng, ASIC’92
• DME needs an abstract routing topology as the input
• It has a bottom-up phase followed by a top-down
process (sounds familiar?)

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DME:

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 Some Thoughts/Trend
• Clock skew scheduling together with clock tree
synthesis
– Schedule the timing slack of a circuit to the individual
registers for optimal performance and as a second
criteria to increase the robustness of the
implementation w.r.t. process variation.
• Variability is a major nanometer concern
• Non-tree clock networks for variation-tolerance
– How to analyze it?
– The task is to investigate a combined optimization
such that clock skew variability is reduced with
minimum wirelength penalty

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 Non-tree: Spine & Mesh

Clock sinks or local sub-

Spines
networks [Su et. al, ICCAD’01]

Clock sinks or local sub-

Applied
networksin Pentium processor

[Kurd et. al. JSSC’01]

Applied in IBM microprocessor

 Very effective, huge wire Clock sinks or local sub-
networks[Restle et. al, JSSC’01] 20
 Non-tree: Link Perspective
• Non-tree = tree + links
• How to select link pairs is the key problem
• Link = link_capacitors + link_resistor
• Key issue: find the best links that can help the skew variation
reduction the most!
u i
C/2
u
Rl
w
w C/2
Rl
u w
C/2 C/2
[Rajaram et al, DAC’04]
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Power Distribution/Routing

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 Power Distribution

• Power Distribution Network functions

– Carry current from pads to transistors on chip
– Maintain stable voltage with low noise
– Provide average and peak power demands
– Provide current return paths for signals
– Avoid electromigration & self-heating wearout
– Consume little chip area and wire
– Easy to lay out

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 Power and Ground Routing
• Each standard cell or macro has power and ground
signals, i.e., Vdd (power) and GND (ground)
• They need to be connected as well
• You can imagine that they are HUGE NETWORKS!
• In general, P/G routings are pretty regular
• They have high priority as well
– P/G routing resources are usually reserved
– When you do global and detailed routing for signal nets, you
cannot use up all the routing resources at each metal layers
• Normally some design rules will be given (e.g., 40% of top metal
layers are reserved for P/G)

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 P/G Routing Main Objectives
• Routing resource
– Need to balance the routing resource for P/G, clock and signals
• Voltage drop
– Static (IR) and dynamic (L di/dt) voltage drops
– More voltage drop means more gate delay
– Usually less than 5-10% voltage drop is allowed
– So you may need to size P/G wires accordingly
• Electrical migration
– Too big current may cause EMI problem
• Others…

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 P/G Mesh (Grid Distribution)
• Power/Ground mesh will allow multiple paths from P/G
sources to destinations
– Less series resistance
– Hierarchical power and ground meshes from upper metal
layers to lower metal layers
• All the way to M1 or M2 (stand cells)
– Connection of lower layer layout/cells to the grid is through
vias

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 Using One Metal Layer
One tree for VDD and another tree for GND.

VDD GND

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 Using Two Metal Layers
One 2D-grid for VDD and another one for GND:

VDD GND

M5 M4

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 Gate Array & Standard Cell Design
Inter-weaved combs:

VDD GND

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 Some Thoughts/Trends
• P/G I/O pad co-optimization with classic
physical design
• Decoupling capacitor can reduce P/G related
voltage drop
– Need to be planned together with floorplanning and
placement
• Multiple voltage/frequency islands make the
P/G problem and clock distributions more
challenging

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