Practical Bounded-Skew Clock Routing

In Clock routing research, such practical considerations as hierarchical buffering, rise-time and overshoot constraints, obstacleand legal location-checking, varying layer parasitics and congestion, and even the underlying design flow are often ignored. This paper explores directions in which traditional formulations can be extended so that the resulting algorithms are more useful in production design environments. Specifically, the following issues are addressed: (i) clock routing for varying layer parasitics with non-zero via parasitics; (ii) obstacle-avoidance clock routing; and (iii) hierarchical buffered tree synthesis. We develop new theoretical analyses and heuristics, and present experimental results that validate our new approaches.