Multi-parameter Timing Optimization for Pulsed-Latch Circuits

A latch driven by extremely narrow clock pulses, also known as pulsed-latch, can be analyzed as conveniently as a flip-flop while maintaining the advantage of high speed and small area. Due to the timing characteristics of the latch, we inevitably need to take pulse widths into account, which introduces at least one additional parameter in the timing optimization process. Unfortunately, conventional Howard's algorithm can only handle a single parameter and thus is not able to tackle this multi-parameter problem. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem using the ellipsoid method, where the conventional negative cycle finding is treated as a cutting-plane oracle. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve a 100-fold speedup compared with the linear programming solver GLPK.