TICA Timing Slack Inference and Clock Frequency Adaption Technique for a Deeply

Abstract

This article presents a timing slack inference and clock frequency adaption technique, named TICA, to mitigate the large and pessimistic timing guardband reserved for process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations in deeply pipelined ultra-low-voltage (ULV) circuits. TICA can perceive the dynamic PVT variations of a circuit with in situ cycle borrowing detectors, then infer its runtime timing slack, and adjust the clock frequency accordingly to minimize the redundant timing margin timely. Th