Race-condition-aware clock skew scheduling

The race conditions often limit the smallest feasible clock period that the optimal clock skew scheduling could achieve. Therefore, the combination of clock skew scheduling and delay insertion (for resolving the race conditions) might lead to further clock period reduction. However, the interactions between clock skew scheduling and delay insertion have not been well studied. In this paper, the authors provided a fresh viewpoint to look at this problem. A novel approach, called race-condition-aware (RCA) clock skew scheduling, is proposed to determine the clock skew schedule by taking the race conditions into account. The objective is not only to optimize the clock period, but also to heuristically minimize the required inserted delay. Compared with previous work, this approach has significant improvement in the time complexity.