High-Speed Clock Network Design

High-Speed Clock Network Design is a collection of design concepts, techniques and research works from the author for clock distribution in microprocessors and high-performance chips. It is organized in 11 chapters as follows. Chapter 1 provides an overview to the design of clock networks. Chapter 2 specifies the timing requirements in digital design. Chapter 3 shows the circuits of sequential elements including latches and flip-flops. Chapter 4 describes the domino circuits, which need special clock signals. Chapter 5 discusses the phase-locked loop (PLL) and delay-locked loop (DLL), which provide the clock generation and de-skewing for the on-chip clock distribution. Chapter 6 summarizes the clock distribution techniques published in the state-of-the-art microprocessor chips. Chapter 7 describes the CAD flow on the clock network simulation. Chapter 8 gives the research work on low-voltage swing clock distribution. Chapter 9 explores the possibility of placing the global clock tree on the package layers. Chapter 10 shows the algorithms of balanced clock routing and wire sizing for the skew minimization. Chapter 11 shows a commercial CAD tool that deals with clock tree synthesis in the ASIC design flow. The glossary is attached at the end of this book. The clock network design is still a challenging task in most high-speed VLSI chips, since the clock frequency and power consumption requirements are increasingly difficult to meet for multiple clock networks on the chip. Many research works and industry examples will be shown in this area to continually improve the clock distribution networks for future high-performance chips.