A parallel algorithm for zero skew clock tree routing

In deep sub-micron fabrication technology, clock skew is one of the dominant factors which determine system performance. Previous works in zero skew clock tree routing assume that the wires have uniform size, and previous wire-sizing algorithms for general signal nets do not produce the exact zero skew. In this paper, we first propose an algorithm to get the exact zero skew wire-sizing by using an iterative method to make the wire size improvement. Our experiments on benchmark clock trees show that the algorithm reduces the source sink delay more than 3 times that of the clock trees with uniform wire sizes and keeps the clock skew zero. Motivated by the computation intensive nature of the zero skew clock tree construction and wire-sizing, we propose a parallel algorithm using a cluster-based clock tree construction algorithm and our zero skew wire-sizing algorithm. Without sacrificing the quality of the solution, on the average we obtain speedups of 7.8 from the parallel clustering based clock tree construction algorithm on an 8 processor SUN SPARC Server 1000E shared memory multi-processor.