Timing Driven Placement for Quasi Delay-Insensitive Circuits

Asynchronous circuits offer promise in handling current and future technology scaling challenges. Unfortunately, their impact has been limited by the lack of design automation. We present A-NTUPLACE, a timing-driven placer uniquely suited to handling quasi delay-insensitive circuits. Our tool uses a generalization of repetitive event rule systems to identify critical signal transitions. The cell placement engine, based on a leading academic placer, NTUPlace3, incorporates net weights to minimize critical wire lengths as well as a novel balancing scheme to ensure isochronic fork constraints are met. We show that our placer is effective at both prioritizing selected nets and balancing forks, demonstrating improvements in 3 of our 4 benchmarks.