Skew Management of NBTI Impacted Gated Clock Trees

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has emerged as the dominant failure mechanism for PMOS devices in nanometer integrated circuit (IC) designs, thus limiting their lifetime. There are several existing research works that mitigate impact of NBTI on gate delay and reliability. However, its impact on one of the most important components of modern IC design-the clock tree-has not been researched enough. Clock gating impacts the extent of NBTI-induced V_TH degradation of clock buffers leading to nonuniform NBTI degradation and, thus, increased clock skew. In this paper, we propose a practical design-time technique of modifying the clock gating implementation by selecting NAND or NOR gate as output stage of integrated clock gating cells with the objective of minimizing NBTI-induced clock skew. This selection intelligently modulates the signal probability and delay equations of clock signal paths with no extra hardware penalty. We formulate the skew minimization problem as an integer linear program which determines the optimal NAND or NOR assignment of clock gating buffer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as the NBTI-induced clock skew is reduced by more than 74% compared to the traditional method. The impact of voltage and temperature variation on the proposed technique was analyzed and we observed reduced but still significant reduction in clock skew under variation as compared to the traditional clock gating technique.