Post silicon skew tuning: Survey and analysis

Clock skew minimization is an important design consideration. However, with the advance of the technology and the smaller device scaling, Process, Voltage, and Temperature (PVT) variations make the clock skew minimization face great challenges. To mitigate the impact of PVT variations, many previous works proposed the Post Silicon Tuning (PST) architecture to dynamically balance the skew of a clock tree. In the PST architecture, there are two main components: Adjustable Delay Buffer (ADB) and Phase Detector (PD). In this paper, we make a survey about existing techniques to the PST architecture and introduce several important design concerns such as the ADB selection, system controlling, and design testing to the PST architecture.