Timing yield enhancement through soft edge flip-flop based design

The first evaluation of a soft-edge flip-flop is presented as an alternative to useful-skew and latch-based designs for variation compensation in a 16-bit 8-tap FIR filter in 0.13 mum CMOS. An 11.2% performance improvement was achieved over a standard hard edge data flip-flop (9.2% when post-silicon useful-skew is applied).