Speeding up technology-independent timing optimization by network partitioning

Technology-independenttimingoptimizationis animportantproblem in logic synthesis. Although many promising techniques have been proposed in the past, unfortunately they are quite slow and thus impracticalfor large networks. In this paper, we propose DEPART, a delay-basedpartitioner-cum-optimizer,which purportsto solve this problem. Given a combinationallogic network that is to be optimizedfor timing, DEPART divides it into sub-networksusing timing information and a constraint on the maximum number of gates allowed in a single sub-network. These sub-networks are then dispatched, one by one, to a standard timing optimizer. The optimizedsub-networks are re-glued, generatingan optimizednetwork. The challenge is how to partition the original network into sub-networks so that the nal solution quality after partitioning and optimizationis comparableto that from the timing optimizer. We propose a partitioning technique that is timing-driven and is simple yet e ective. We compare DEPART with sp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Rajat Aggarwal, Rajeev Murgai, Masahiro Fujita
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 1997, Partitioning Techniques, Standard Timing Optimizer, Timing Optimizer