62445228
Practical repeater insertion for low power: what repeater library do we need?
This paper investigates the problem of repeater insertion for low power under a given timing budget. A novel repeater insertion algorithm is proposed to compute the optimal repeater number and width in the discrete solution space, as defined by a given repeater library. Using the proposed algorithm, two practical and highly important questions are addressed. Given a certain tolerance to the degradation of repeater power dissipation: 1) how coarse could the repeater size granularity be? 2) What range should repeater widths be in? The experimental results provide valuable insights into repeater library design. Specifically, the investigation reveals that coarse repeater size granularities can be used to reduce the library size by more than 87% with merely a 4% power degradation. Moreover, for two-pin interconnects with various wire lengths and timing targets, the range of optimal repeater sizes for low power is limited, indicating that a low-cost small-size repeater library, if well designed, is adequate to provide high-quality repeater insertion solutions. The proposed scheme can be used in early design stages to generate a compact repeater library that is passed on to other repeater insertion algorithms.
1752593
RITC: repeater insertion with timing target compensation
This paper investigates the problem of repeater insertion for global interconnects under given timing constraints. A novel technique is proposed to aggressively reduce the positive timing slack for maximal repeater reduction while maintaining timing closure. Our scheme is both fast and effective due to the judicious combination of accurate SPICE simulations and the simple Elmore delay model. In comparison with other repeater insertion solvers, our scheme achieves up to 41% reduction in total repeater width in comparable runtimes.
5855159
Skew spreading for peak current reduction
This paper presents a circuit optimization technique called skewspreading. Given an edge-triggered sequential circuit, skew spreadingderives the required clock arrival times for all registers so that theskews are distributed evenly in a preselected time window without changing the operating frequency of the circuit. Skew spreading is ideal for peak current reduction, since it distributes clock activities and the ensuing signal activities widely in time. We have developed a skew spreading algorithm and applied it to a suite of benchmark circuits. Simulation results demonstrate that the variance of the resulting skew from the uniform distribution can be reduced to 4% on the average. In comparison to other gate-level peak current reduction techniques, our scheme achieves an average improvement of 17% with a speedup of up to 13.9 times.
5155570
Low-power repeater insertion with both delay and slew rate constraints
In this paper, a novel repeater insertion algorithm is presented to minimize the power dissipation of interconnect trees under given timing budgets and slew rate constraints. In contrast to traditional bottom-up dynamic programming approaches, the proposed algorithm combines a Lagrangian relaxation framework and a graph-based search method to derive possible solutions in a top-down fashion. As a result, it is capable of analyzing repeater slew rates efficiently. In addition, our scheme incorporates accurate circuit models and is therefore able to capture the precise delay and slew rate information, leading to high-quality interconnect designs. We have applied our scheme to interconnects of different topologies and various timing and slew rate constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in comparison with previous low-power repeater insertion schemes. Under tight timing constraints, our scheme can always derive repeater insertion solutions that meet both delay and slew rate requirements, whereas other schemes often fail. Under loose timing constraints, our algorithm achieves up to a 23% average power dissipation reduction for different interconnects specifications with shorter runtimes
13241066
Retiming and clock scheduling for digital circuit optimization
This paper investigates the application of simultaneous retiming and clock scheduling for optimizing synchronous circuits under setup and hold constraints. Two optimization problems are explored: (1) clock period minimization and (2) tolerance maximization to clock-signal delay variations. Exact mixed-integer linear programming formulations and efficient heuristics are given for both problems. When both long and short paths are considered, circuits optimized by the combined application of retiming and clock scheduling can achieve shorter clock periods or demonstrate greater tolerance to clock-signal delay variations than circuits optimized by retiming or clock scheduling. Experiments with benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined optimization. In comparison with the best result obtained by either of the two optimizations, the joint application of retiming and clock scheduling increased operating speeds by more than 8% on the average. It also increased tolerance to clock delay variations by an average of 12% over a broad range of target clock frequencies. Larger relative improvements were achieved for shorter clock periods, thus suggesting that simultaneous retiming and clock scheduling can play an important role in high-speed design.
17545097
Design of Rotary Clock Based Circuits
Rotary clock technique has been shown to reduce the power dissipation of clock distribution by up to 80%. However, to our knowledge, no practical digital synchronous circuit has been designed that utilizes the rotary technique due to the multi-phase nature of rotary clock signals and the strong coupling between a rotary clock network and the circuit it drives. In this paper, we make the first attempt to design rotary based circuit by proposing a unified clock and circuit design methodology. Given a sequential circuit and a clock frequency, our scheme derives a rotary clock network and a functionally equivalent circuit so that they can be integrated to operate reliably at the target frequency. We have applied our scheme to design several rotary clock based DSP modules. Simulation results show that all designs operate correctly with no timing violation. Compared with designs using conventional clock trees, our designs achieve an average clock power saving of more than 70%.
9356286
A design of overlay anonymous multicast protocol
Multicast services are demanded by a variety of applications. Many applications require anonymity during their communication. However, there has been very little work on anonymous multicasting and such services are not available yet. Since there are fundamental differences between multicast and unicast, the solutions proposed for anonymity in unicast communications cannot be directly applied to multicast applications. In this paper, we define the anonymous multicast system, and propose a mutual anonymous multicast (MAM) protocol including the design of a unicast mutual anonymity protocol and construction and optimization of an anonymous multicast tree. MAM is self organizing and completely distributed. We define the attack model in an anonymous multicast system and analyze the anonymity degree. We also evaluate the performance of MAM by simulations
21789348
Evolutionary algorithms for grouping high dimensional Email data
Grouping problems arise in many industrial and medical applications; examples include bin packing, workshop layout design, and graph colouring. This type of problem has been successfully handled using Grouping Genetic Algorithms. However in problems where there are perhaps thousands of objects to be grouped, we have found that Genetic Algorithm approaches can run into problems. This paper continues our research into a method we have developed for decomposing a large number of objects into mutually exclusive subsets where within-group dependencies are high and between-group dependencies are low. The method uses an Evolutionary Algorithm approach but where the whole population is a solution to the grouping problem rather than considering many candidate solutions. This reduces the resource overheads during computer implementation and the results are promising when compared with standard statistical methods and a Hill Climbing algorithm, all applied to email log file data.
8133100
Geometry-assisted statistical modeling for face mosaicing
The modeling of facial appearance has many applications. This paper proposes an approach to generating a statistical face model based on video mosaicing. Unlike traditional video mosaicing, we use the geometry of a face to improve the mosaicing result. Given a face sequence, each frame is unwrapped onto certain portion of the surface of a sphere, as determined by spherical projection and the minimization procedure using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. A statistical model containing a mean image and a number of eigenimages, instead of only one image template, is used to represent the face mosaic. Good experimental results have been observed.
3266821
A Least Biased Fuzzy Clustering Method
A new operational definition of cluster is proposed, and a fuzzy clustering algorithm with minimal biases is formulated by making use of the maximum entropy principle to maximize the entropy of the centroids with respect to the data points (clustering entropy). The authors make no assumptions on the number of clusters or their initial positions. For each value of an adimensional scale parameter /spl beta/', the clustering algorithm makes each data point iterate towards one of the cluster's centroids, so that both hard and fuzzy partitions are obtained. Since the clustering algorithm can make a multiscale analysis of the given data set one can obtain both hierarchy and partitioning type clustering. The relative stability with respect to /spl beta/' of each cluster structure is defined as the measurement of cluster validity. The authors determine the specific value of /spl beta/' which corresponds to the optimal positions of cluster centroids by minimizing the entropy of the data points with respect to the centroids (clustered entropy). Examples are given to show how this least biased method succeeds in getting perceptually correct clustering results. >
36065326
Learning short multivariate time series models through evolutionary and sparse matrix computation
Multivariate time series (MTS) data are widely available in different fields including medicine, finance, bioinformatics, science and engineering. Modelling MTS data accurately is important for many decision making activities. One area that has been largely overlooked so far is the particular type of time series where the data set consists of a large number of variables but with a small number of observations. In this paper we describe the development of a novel computational method based on Natural Computation and sparse matrices that bypasses the size restrictions of traditional statistical MTS methods, makes no distribution assumptions, and also locates the associated parameters. Extensive results are presented, where the proposed method is compared with both traditional statistical and heuristic search techniques and evaluated on a number of criteria. The results have implications for a wide range of applications involving the learning of short MTS models.