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A clock mesh network synthesis method is proposed which enables clock gating on the local sub-trees in order to reduce the clock power dissipation. Clock gating is performed with a register clustering strategy that considers both i) the similarity of switching activities between registers in a local area and ii) the timing slack on every local data path in the design. This is the first work known in literature that encapsulates the efficient implementation of the gated local trees and activity driven register clustering with timing slack awareness for clock mesh synthesis. Experimental results show that with gated local tree and activity driven register clustering, the switching capacitance on the mesh network can be reduced by 22% with limited skew degradation. The proposed method has two synthesis modes as low power mode and high performance mode to serve different design purposes.

A novel clock mesh network synthesis approach is proposed in this paper which generates an improved mesh size with registers placed incrementally considering the timing slack on the data paths and the non-uniform grid wire placement. The primary objective of the method is to reduce the power dissipation without a global skew degradation, which is achieved through a sparse and non-uniform mesh implementation with registers incrementally placed in close vicinity to the mesh grids. The incremental register placement is based on the timing information in order to preserve the timing slack of the circuit. Experimental results show that the total wirelength (mesh grid wires and stub wires) as well as the power dissipation is reduced significantly on the clock mesh network. Specifically, the wirelength of the mesh network and the power dissipation of the clock network are reduced by 52% and 48% on average, respectively. Moreover, the global clock skew and the non-negative timing slack are preserved.