Planar clock routing for high performance chip and package co-design

A new concept of chip and package co-design for the clock network is presented in this paper. We propose a two level clock distribution scheme which partitions the clock network into two levels. First, the clock terminals are partitioned into a set of clusters. For each cluster, a local on-chip clock tree is used to distribute the clock signal from a locally inserted buffer to terminals inside this cluster. The clock signal is then distributed from the main clock driver to each of local buffers by means of a global clock tree, which is a planar tree with equal path lengths. With the flip chip area I/O attachment, the planar global clock tree can be put on a dedicated package layer. The interconnect on the package layer has two to four order smaller resistance than that on the chip layer. The main contribution of this paper is a novel algorithm to construct a planar clock tree with equal path lengths-the length of the path from the clock source to each destination is exactly the same. In addition, the path length from the source to destinations is minimized.