A Designer's Perspective on Timing Closure

As technology nodes advance and designs become more complex, EDA developers strive to provide new and better solutions to the traditional problems encountered in back-end implementation. The usefulness of these EDA solutions is dependent on acceptance by designers, who often have different goals than developers. This presentation will offer a designer's perspective on current EDA solutions, with a focus on timing closure. Topics will include automated floorplanning goals, clock tree structure tradeoffs, data net repowering challenges and hold padding strategies. Examples from design experience will be used to illustrate where current EDA solutions work well, and what the obstacles are in cases where they do not.