The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jul. 08, 2003
Filed:
Mar. 15, 2001
Charles Jay Alpert, Austin, TX (US);
Rama Gopal Gandham, Wappingers Falls, NY (US);
Jiang Hu, Austin, TX (US);
Stephen Thomas Quay, Austin, TX (US);
Andrew James Sullivan, Wappingers Falls, NY (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An apparatus and method for determining buffered Steiner trees for complex circuits is provided. The apparatus and method first clusters sinks with similar characteristics such as criticality, polarity and distance. The purpose of this step is to potentially isolate positive sinks from negative ones and non-critical sinks from critical ones. The present invention then constructs low-level Steiner trees over each of these clusters. Finally, a top-level timing driven Steiner tree is computed where each cluster is treated as a sink. The top-level tree is then merged with the low-level trees to yield a solution for the entire net.