Identification of gates for covering all critical paths
M. Moiz Khan, Spyros Tragoudas, Magdy S. Abadir, B. Liu · 2006
A zero-suppressed binary decision diagram (ZBDD) based method is presented to identify a small set of gates so that every critical path contains at least one of the selected gates. All paths above a threshold D/sub th/ are stored in a ZBDD. Static implications are used to eliminate unsensitizable paths. A min-cut method on the ZBDD is then used to identify a small set of gates in the circuit for buffer insertion or resizing to optimize delay of the whole circuit. It is observed that the methodology identifies a very small set of gates and its effectiveness demonstrated experimentally on ISCAS'85 and ITC99 benchmarks.