Automating wave-pipelined circuit design

Abstract

Wave pipelining offers faster clock rates than conventional pipelining; however, wave-pipelined circuit design is time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise. Wave pipelining is especially vulnerable to delay changes due to variations in process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) and in the operating environment. Wave pipelining's performance is also affected by the minimum-delay path. Thus, minimum delay is also a concern for wave-pipelined circuits. Automating wave-pipelined circuit design, especially generating a design netlist, is therefore challenging. To automate the generation of wave-pipelined design netlists, we use a commercial synthesis tool, the synopsys design compiler, and delay-balancing scripts.