A convex programming solution for gate-sizing with pipelining constraints

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel geometric programming based formulation to solve a gate-sizing and retiming problem in the context of circuit optimization. The gate-sizing aspect of the problem involves continuous variables while the retiming problem involves the placement of registers in the circuit and can be naturally modeled using discrete variables. Our formulation is solved using first-order convex programming. We show promising experimental results on industrial circuits. We also investigate formally the computational complexity of the problem. To our knowledge, this is the first effort that solves this problem in a single optimization framework.