Abstract
Factors of delay variation, such as process variation and noise effects, may cause a manufactured chip to violate the pre-specified timing constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel re-synthesis technique to tolerate delay variation for domino circuits. Note that the slacks of nodes along critical paths are zero; any delay addition to those zero-slack nodes will worsen the final performance of a circuit. Our basic idea is to increase the slacks of nodes in the critical region by appending a redundant auxiliary sub-circuit to the original circuit. The auxiliary sub-circuit can cause critical paths to become false paths or imperceptible paths [7] so as to improve the capability of delay variation tolerance. Experimental results are very encouraging. © 2006 IEEE.