Datapath Design Closure Challenges: An Emphasis on Speed, Power and Area

Abstract

There is a lot of change in the recent design closure flows, a transition from standalone tools for synthesis, static timing analysis, placement and routing to an integrated design flows. This gradual change is due to scaling of technology, increase in design complexity and increasing demand for time to market. Several powerful features in the integrated backend design tool help in dealing with modern design requirements and to meet aggressive targets. The advanced analysis flows are used in the design of complex processor blocks. The major challenges faced in the design closure of latest chip blocks are leakage power, delay, area and reliability. This paper presents advanced techniques to minimize power dissipation, meet desired frequency without sacrificing the circuit quality and to arrive at an optimal design for a datapath logic block. But in a race to achieve these mentioned design constraints it is very much necessary to ensure the functional correctness of the design. Thus a formal verification method for maintaining equivalence between RTL and gate level netlist is carried out concurrently along the designflow.