A clock distribution scheme for nonsymmetric VLSI circuits

The authors propose a clock distribution scheme that minimizes the difference in the length of clock lines, which is the foremost factor responsible for clock skew in a VLSI circuit. The scheme uses the hierarchy created by the clock buffers to parallelize the distribution of the clock signal. At each hierarchical level, an exhaustive search of paths with intelligent pruning is used to determine the optimal layout of clock lines at that level. Unlike other related work in this area, both delay and skew are taken into account in determining the layout.<>