Abstract
Crosstalk effect results in performance degradation and at worst gives incorrect result in contemporary VLSI manufacturing. In this dissertation, we present a new perspective on high performance domino circuit design taking crosstalk effect into consideration. In the first part, we propose a maximum crosstalk effect minimization algorithm, taking logic synthesis into consideration for PLA structures. To minimize the crosstalk effect, a technique of permuting wire is used, which contains the following steps. First, product terms are partitioned into a long set and a short set, and then product terms in the long and short sets are interleaved. After that, we take advantage of the crosstalk immunity of product terms in the long set to further reduce the maximum coupling capacitance of the PLA. Finally, synthesis techniques such as local transformation and global transformation are taken into consideration to search for a better result. The experiments demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively minimize the maximum coupling capacitance of a circuit by 51% as compared with the original area-minimized PLA without crosstalk effect minimization. In the second part, we propose a logic synthesis flow to synthesize a domino-cell network with less crosstalk effect. Crosstalk immunity property of OR gate and relations between wire adjacency and cell I/O are exploited in technology mapping. Meanwhile, metric to measure the crosstalk sensitivity of domino cells in synthesis level is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the crosstalk sensitivity of the synthesized domino-cell network is greatly reduced by 52% using our synthesis flow as compared with conventional methodology. Furthermore, after placement and routing are performed, the ratio of the number of crosstalk-immune wire pairs to the number of total wire pairs is about 24% using our methodology as compared to 9\% using conventional techniques and the maximum wire coupling can be greatly reduced from 95% to 60%. In the last part, we propose a routing algorithm taking crosstalk immunity into consideration. The crosstalk immunity relation computed during technology mapping is utilized to reduce the crosstalk effect during wire routing. First, via number estimation and wire couple estimation are proposed to estimate the criticality precisely. Then, we present a path-based routing framework to route critical or near-critical nets first. Finally, crosstalk-avoidance rerouting is performed to reduce crosstalk coupling. The experimental result shows that the circuit delay routed by our performance-driven router is 4.7% less than that routed by MR. After initial routing, our crosstalk-avoidance rerouting can reduce 17% of the maximum wire coupling on critical wires.