Meeting delay constraints in DSM by minimal repeater insertion

We address the problem of inserting repeaters, selected from a library, at feasible locations in a placed and routed network to meet user-specified delay constraints for deep submicron (DSM) technology. We use minimal repeater area by taking advantage of slacks available in the network. Specifically, we transform the problem into an unconstrained optimization problem and solve it by iterative local refinement. We show that the optimal repeater locations and sizes that locally minimize the objective function in the unconstrained problem can be efficiently computed. We have implemented our algorithm and tested it on a set of benchmarks; experimental results are promising.