Patent attributes
The present invention includes a method and an apparatus, in one embodiment, in the form of an integrated circuit and programmable fabric design tool, for calculating skew in a manner that does not include unnecessary skew values, resulting in a skew value without pessimism. A setup slack determination ensures that data launched or transmitted from a source register reaches the destination register within a specified maximum cycle time and is defined as the difference between a minimum (early) destination time and a maximum (late) source time without unnecessary skew values. A hold check slack determination ensures the data does not “race” from the source register to the destination register on the same clock edge and is calculated as a difference between a maximum (late) destination time and a minimum (early) source time without unnecessary skew values. A circuit's operational frequency and layout are based upon the method for calculating skew.
