Automatic register banking for low-power clock trees

Abstract

We present an automatic register placement technique that enables the synthesis of low-power clock trees for low-power ICs. On 7 industrial designs, comparing to (1) a commercial base flow and (2) the power-aware placement technique in, the technique respectively reduced clock-tree power by 19.0% and 14.9%, total power by 15.3% and 5.2% and WNS under on-chip variation (plusmn10%) by 1.8% and 1.5% on average.