Delay Optimization of Combinational Logic by And-Or Path Restructuring

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic programming method for delay-optimized circuit design that improves timing performance by restructuring And-Or paths, outperforming previous approaches and integrating into industrial design flows.

Contribution

A novel dynamic programming algorithm for delay optimization of And-Or paths with practical integration into physical design processes.

Findings

Outperforms earlier methods in delay optimization

Effective on 7nm real-world instances

Enables late-stage logical restructuring in design flow

Abstract

We propose a dynamic programming algorithm that constructs delay-optimized circuits for alternating And-Or paths with prescribed input arrival times. Our algorithm fulfills best-known approximation guarantees and empirically outperforms earlier methods by exploring a significantly larger portion of the solution space. Our algorithm is the core of a new timing optimization framework that replaces critical paths of arbitrary length by logically equivalent realizations with less delay. Our framework allows revising early decisions on the logical structure of the netlist in a late step of an industrial physical design flow. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool on 7nm real-world instances.