An ILP formulation for yield-driven architectural synthesis

Data flow graph dominant designs, such as communication video and audio applications, are common in today's IC industry. In these designs, the datapath resources (e.g., adders, multipliers) count more than 90% in area. Different datapath resources have very different properties in terms of area, delay, power and yield. Considering yield during system level design can result in significant benefits. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for yield-aware architectural synthesis is presented in this paper. The proposed approach attempts to maximize the yield of the design while satisfying other constraints like area and delay. Through experiments on several benchmarks, we show that incorporating the yield as an objective during architectural synthesis can significantly improve the yield compared to conventional methods. Transistor sizing at the circuit level can also be incorporated in our method to further improve the yield.