Optimistic Skew - 2021.1 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Design Analysis and Closure Techniques (UG906)

Document ID
UG906
Release Date
2021-06-30
Version
2021.1 English

Xilinx FPGA devices provide advanced clocking resources such as dedicated clock routing trees and Clock Modifying Blocks (CMB). Some of the CMBs have the capability to compensate the clock tree insertion delay by using a Phase Lock Loop circuit (present in PLL or MMCM primitives). The amount of compensation is based on the insertion delay present on the feedback loop of the PLL. In many cases, a PLL (or MMCM) drives several clock trees with the same type of buffer, including on the feedback loop. As the device can be large, the insertion delay on all these clock tree branches does not always match the feedback loop delay. The clocks driven by a PLL become over-compensated when the feedback loop delay is bigger than the source or destination clock delay. In this case, the sign of the CPR changes and it effectively removes skew optimism from the slack value. This is needed in order to ensure that there is no artificial skew at the common node of any timing path clocks during the analysis.

Recommended: Always use the CPR compensation during timing analysis to preserve the slack accuracy and the overall timing signoff quality.