Clock Skew and Uncertainty - 2020.2 English

UltraFast Design Methodology Guide for Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs

Document ID
UG949
Release Date
2021-02-18
Version
2020.2 English

Xilinx devices use various types of routing resources to support most common clocking schemes and requirements such as high fanout clocks, short propagation delays, and extremely low skew. Clock skew affects any register-to-register path with either a combinational logic or interconnect between them.

Recommended: Run a design analysis report (report_design_analysis) to generate a timing report, which includes information on clock skew data. Verify that the clock nets do not contain excessive clock skew.

Clock skew in high performance clock domains (+300 MHz) can impact performance. In general, the clock skew should be no more than 500 ps. For example, 500 ps represents 15% of a 300 MHz clock period, which is equivalent to the timing budget of 1 or 2 logic levels. In cross domain clock paths the skew can be higher, because the clocks use different resources and the common node is located further up the clock trees. SDC-based tools time all clocks together unless constraints specify that they should not be (e.g., set_clock_groups, set_false_path, or set_max_delay -datapath_only).