Design closure driven delay relaxation based on convex cost network flow

Design closure becomes hard to achieve at physical layout stage due to the emergence of long global interconnects. Consequently, interconnect planning needs to be integrated in high level synthesis. Delay relaxation that assigns extra clock latencies to functional resources at RTL (register transfer level) can be leveraged. This paper proposed a general formulation for design closure driven delay relaxation problem. The authors show that the general formulation can be transformed into a convex cost integer dual network flow problem and solved in polynomial time using the convex cost-scaling algorithm in (Ahuja et al., 2003). Experimental results validate the efficiency of the approach