Fast Electrical Correction Using Resizing and Buffering

Current design methodologies are geared towards meeting different design criteria, such as delay, area or power. However, in order to correctly identify the critical parts of a circuit for optimization, the circuit has to be electrically clean - i.e., slews on each pin have to be within certain limits, a gate cannot drive more than a certain amount of capacitance, etc. Thus far, this requirement has largely been ignored in the literature. Instead, existing methods which optimize delay are used to fix electrical violations. This leads to solutions that are unnecessarily expensive, and still leave violations that remain unfixed. There is therefore a need for an area-efficient strategy that targets the electrical state of a circuit and fixes all violations quickly. This paper explicitly defines "electrical violations" and presents a flexible approach (called EVE, the electrical violation eliminator) for fixing these. Experimental results validate our approach.