Design and Analysis of Clock Gating Elements

Background/Objectives: As the complexity of system on chip increases the timing sign-off becomes a challenging task for STA (Static Timing Analysis) engineer. Methods/Statistical analysis: Due to the wide usage of IP’s, change in power and skew may occur among different regions of chip. To address this issue clock gating and zero skew algorithms are mainly used. It is good design idea to turn off the clock when it is not needed. Findings: This paper proposes  a new  NOR/OR  cells with different driving strengths and a new tunable delay elememt . These designed cells can be  used in automatic clock gating which is supported by modern EDA tools. The proposed method of clock buffers with different sizes are designed and compared with ISCAS89 Benchmark circuits (s35932, s38417, and  s38584).These components are designed and tested using Cadence ICFB and SOC encounter P&R tool. Applications/Improvements: This clock gating elements can be used in any System-on-a-Chip (SoC) application where minimum skew is required.