- It is always desirable to distribute clock signal over the chip area with a uniform delay.
- In order to handle high fan-out loads, the clock signals must be buffered in multiple stages.
- It is also important that every buffer stage drives the same number of fanout gate so that clock delays are always buffered.
The figure below shows buffered clock distribution tree.
Buffers amplify degraded clock signal. Due to variation of active device characteristics buffers are primary source of clock skew for a well balanced clock tree.
- Buffers provide sufficient currents to drive the network capacitance and maintain high quality clock waveforms.
Symmetric H-tree clock distribution network: