FF-bond: Multi-bit flip-flop bonding at placement
Journal
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Physical Design
Pages
147-153
Date Issued
2013
Author(s)
Abstract
Clock power contributes a significant portion of chip power in modern IC design. Applying multi-bit flip-flops can effectively reduce clock power. State-of-the-art work performs multi-bit flip-flop clustering at the post-placement stage. However, the solution quality may be limited because the combinational gates are immovable during the clustering process. To overcome the deficiency, in this paper, we propose multi-bit flip-flop bonding at placement. Inspired by ionic bonding in Chemistry, we direct flip-flops to merging friendly locations thus facilitating flip-flop merging. Experimental results show that our algorithm, called FF-Bond, can save 27% clock power on average. Compared with state-of-the-art post-placement multi-bit flip-flop clustering, FF-Bond can further reduce 14% clock power.
SDGs
Type
conference paper