Optimal integer delay-budget assignment on directed acyclic graphs

Excess delay that each component of a design can tolerate under a given timing constraint is referred to as delay budget. Delay budgeting has been widely exploited to improve the design quality in very large scale integrated computer-aided design flow. The objective of the delay-budgeting problem investigated in this paper is to maximize the total delay budget assigned to each node in a directed acyclic graph under a given timing constraint. Due to the discreteness of the timing of the components in the libraries during design-optimization flow, discrete solution for delay budgeting is essential. We present an optimal integer delay-budgeting algorithm. We prove that the problem can be solved optimally in polynomial time. In addition, we look at different extensions of the delay-budgeting problem, such as maximization of weighted summation of delay budgets assigned to the nodes with constraints on the lower and upper bounds on the delay budget allocated to each node. We prove that for both aforementioned extensions, our algorithm can produce an optimal integer solution in polynomial time. Our algorithm is generic and can be applied at different design tasks at different levels of abstraction. We applied our proposed optimal delay-budgeting algorithm in library mapping during datapath synthesis on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform, using preoptimized cores of FPGA libraries. For each application, we go through synthesis and place and route stages in order to obtain accurate results. Our optimal algorithm outperforms the zero-slack algorithm (Nair et al. 1989) in terms of area by 10% on average for all applications. In some applications, optimal delay budgeting can speedup runtime of place and route up to two times.