US Patent 7945880 Constraint based retiming of synchronous circuits

In one embodiment of the invention, a method of retiming a circuit is disclosed. The method includes computing an upper bound and a lower bound for a clock period of a clock signal to clock a circuit in response to a netlist of the circuit; selecting a potential clock period for the clock signal to clock registers of the circuit in response to the computed upper bound and the computed lower bound for the clock period; computing an upper bound and a lower bound of a retiming value for each node of the circuit to determine if a retiming of the circuit is achievable with the potential clock period; and computing the retiming value for each node of the circuit to minimize circuit area in response to the computed upper bound and the computed lower bound of the retiming value for each node.