Design Optimization
Last Edit July 22, 2001
Optimization Approaches
There are several approaches to optimizing a design as shown in Table
4-1.
Table 4-1 Design Optimization Objectives
General Design Optimization Objectives |
- improve speed and minimize distortion
- balance speed (tracking)
- reduce internal cell utilization
- reduce I/O pin count
- reduce power
- (lower the junction temperature)
- increase circuit testability
- increase circuit reliability
- reduce cost
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These "design objectives" are often incompatible. Each design will have
its own priority order for these items, establishing the basis for decisions
where choices must be made.
For example, design requirements may include a power dissipation limit
or a junction temperature restriction. Solving the power equation may
violate the speed requirements.
The maximum specified operating frequency and critical path performance
are usually clearly defined. Balanced path design is essential in communications
circuits and has its own restrictions and tracking requirements. Macros
selected to allow speed to be achieved may increase power while macros
chosen to allow balanced delays may increase cell utilization.
Cell utilization can determine which array in a series is acceptable,
and the larger arrays do cost more. Cell reduction techniques may affect
final speed, power and cost.
The reliability of the circuit is a question of the "trickiness" of the
timing and the logic design. The so-called "hot dog" designers are as
welcome in a company as their software counterparts - their designs are
difficult to build, test or maintain. Modular designs are an important
reliability and testability issue. Modularity may require additional macros
for degating while testability may require additional macros for test
point monitoring or circuits such as scan-path.
A circuit must be testable to at least the 90% confidence level, preferably
higher, and testability issues should have been in place before the design
start. Refinements to the circuit testability are what should be required
at this point in the design cycle.
Circuits with design for test (DFT) modules will average 10-20% more
cells than circuits that do not use DFT. DFT circuits are easier to develop
test vectors for than non-DFT circuits and they require significantly
less vectors. (See Chapter 8.)
The size of the test vector set also has an effect on cost. It is more
costly to develop a large set of vectors, more time consuming to fault-grade
them and takes more tester time to test the die.
DESIGN FOR SPEED
There are several basic design approaches that can help the designer
achieve the desired speed from the circuit. A list is provided in Table
4-2.
Table 4-2 Designing For A High-Speed Circuit
Design Procedures for a High-Speed Circuit |
- Minimize the circuit logic.
- Evaluate several implementations of speed-critical paths.
- Reduce interconnections, gate count and chip area.
- Use dense, silicon-efficient macros where possible.
- Use the correct macro-option or version.
- Place signals efficiently in multilevel gating structures.
Place late-arriving signals as last-level inputs.
- Place critical signals on the fastest paths when the macro
has more than one propagation delay.
- Where there are complementary outputs on a macro, alternate
the signal to balance loading delays, watching loads, drive-factors.
- Where there are complementary outputs, use the fastest path
to propagate a critical signal.
- Duplicate logic to reduce the fan-out and metal load delay
in the critical path (balance this against the added load delay
to duplicate the signal and added silicon).
- Use the correct-drive macro for the fan-out at each net (do
not overload). Do not use high fan-out drivers for low loads.
Use fan-out derating on all macros except identified super-drivers.
- Avoid wire-ORs when available as they add to metal loading.
- Use binary counters instead of shift counters (parallel versus
serial).
- Use parallel load counters and parallel data transfer.
- Use carry-look ahead, carry generate-propagate and other fast-adder
techniques
- Choose the design for high-input logic gates carefully. Investigate
design options and their speeds.
- Perform a pulse-distortion review and minimize distortion in
critical paths.
- Minimize output pin capacitive loading, both system load and
package pin capacitance.
- Last resort: specify placement restrictions for difficult paths
(less than 20% of the paths in the array).
- Last resort: ask the vendor for a custom macro to enhance speed.
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