Non-Uniform Clock Mesh Synthesis with Clock Gating and Register Clustering

As the increasing complexity of chip design, reducing both power consumption and clock skew becomes a crucial research topic in clock network synthesis. Among various clock network synthesis approaches, clock tree has less power consumption in comparison with clock mesh structure. In contrast, clock mesh has a higher tolerance of process variation and hence is easier to satisfy the clock skew constraint. To reduce the power consumption of clock mesh network, an effective way is to minimize the wire capacitance of stub wires. In addition, integration of clock gating and register clustering techniques on clock mesh network can further reduce dynamic power consumption. In this paper, under both enable timing constraint and clock skew constraint, we propose a methodology to reduce the switching capacitance by non-uniform clock mesh synthesis, clock gate insertion and register clustering. In comparison with clock mesh synthesis and clock gating technique individually, experimental results show that our methodology can improve both the clock skew and switching capacitance efficiently.