Achieving the Shortest Clock Period byInserting the Minimum Amount of

The performance of a circuit depends on its clock period. The shorter a valid clock period is, the better the performance is. The clock period is tightly related to the diierence between the longest propagation delay and the shortest propagation delay from primary inputs to primary outputs. The objective of this paper is to minimize the amount of delay inserted while achieving the shortest clock period. Inserting delay buuers is done after traditional delay optimization. We propose an optimal algorithm based on a novel linear programming formulation. Our algorithm can also be used to solve similar delay buuer problems.