Fast Synthesis of Low Power Clock Trees Based on Register Clustering

Chao Deng,  Yici Cai,  Qiang Zhou
Tsinghua University


Abstract

Clock networks dissipate a significant fraction of the entire chip power budget. In contrast to most of the traditional works that handle the power optimization problem with clock routing or buffer sizing, we propose a novel register clustering methodology for power reduction of clock trees. Moreover, a fast three-stage clock tree synthesis (CTS) approach based on register clustering is presented to verify the validity of the methodology. By comparison with the state-of-the-art low power CTS research works Contango2.0 [10] and the CTS of Purdue University [7], our three-stage CTS approach achieves 1.30x, 1.07x smaller power consumption while exhibiting 2.01x, 1.52x smaller skew. Furthermore, the runtime of our CTS approach is 17.36x, 8.16x shorter than that of [10] and [7] respectively.