Module selection using manufacturing information

Since manufacturing processes inherently fluctuate, LSI chips which are produced from the same design have different propagation delays. However, the difference in delays caused by the the process fluctuation has rarely been considered in most high-level synthesis systems which were developed before. This paper presents a new approach to module selection in high-level synthesis, which exploits difference in functional unit delays. First, a module library model which assumes the probabilistic nature of functional unit delays is presented. Then, we propose a module selection problem and an algorithm which minimizes the cost per faultless chip. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm finds the optimal module selection which would not have been explored without manufacturing information.