Clock skew reduction by self-compensating manufacturing variability with on-chip sensors

This paper presents a self-compensation scheme of manufacturing variability for clock skew reduction. In the proposed scheme, a CDN with embedded variability sensors tunes variable clock drivers for canceling the clock skew induced by manufacturing variability. We apply the proposed scheme for a mesh-style CDN in a 65nm technology and evaluate the deskewing effect as a function of the sensor performance. Experimental results show that the skew can be reduced by over 70% and the correlation coefficient between estimated and actual variabilities, which represents the sensor performance, should be more than 0.3 for skew reduction. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.7.1 [Integrated Circuits]: Types and Design Styles General Terms Design, Performance Keywords Clock distribution, Manufacturing variability, Self-compensation, On-chip sensors

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: GLVLSI
• Authors: Shinya Abe, Kenichi Shinkai, Masanori Hashimoto, Takao Onoye
• Keywords: Clock Skew, GLVLSI 2010, Manufacturing Variability, Skew Reduction, VLSI