Reducing Clock Skew - 2021.2 English

UltraFast Design Methodology Guide for Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs

Document ID
UG949
Release Date
2021-11-19
Version
2021.2 English

To meet requirements such as high fanout clocks, short propagation delays, and low clock skew, Xilinx devices use dedicated routing resources to support the most common clocking schemes. Clock skew can severely reduce timing budget on high frequency clocks. Clock skew can also add excessive stress on implementation tools to meet both setup and hold when the device utilization is high.

The clock skew is typically less than 300 ps for intra-clock timing paths and less than 500 ps for timing paths between balanced synchronous clocks. When crossing resource columns, clock skew shows more variation, which is reflected in the timing slack and optimized by the implementation tools. For timing paths between unbalanced clock trees or with no common node, clock skew can be several nanoseconds, making timing closure almost impossible.

To reduce clock skew:

  1. Review all clock relationships to ensure that only synchronous clock paths are timed and optimized.
  2. Review the clock tree topologies and placement of timing paths impacted by higher clock skew than expected, as described in the following sections.
  3. Identify the possible clock skew reduction techniques, as described in the following sections.