US Patent 10216880 Systems and methods for power efficient flop clustering

Methods and systems of optimization of and Integrated Circuit (IC) design disclosed herein result in a power efficient clustering of circuit devices. The methods may depart from the conventional geometric clustering using a nearest neighbor approach when wiring flops to local clock buffers. To reduce the number of clock-gaters, the methods in one embodiment use a grouping of flops wired to a common clock-gater to form nodes, which are then wired to the local clock buffers based on a load-balancing process. In another embodiment, the methods use a local cleanup process to rewire the nodes between neighboring clock buffers to further reduce the amount of clock-gaters.