There is disclosed a system for designing circuits which involves
pre-placing delay elements between circuit components susceptible to
shoot-through due to effects of clock skew, each delay element having a
physical form and at least one input terminal and at least one output
terminal; determining which delay elements are not critical in preventing
shoot-through; removing non-critical delay elements from the circuit; and
replacing each removed delay element with a cell having a physical form
equivalent to the physical form of the removed delay element and a wire
connection between an input and an output of the cell equivalent to an
input and output of the delay element. This wire cell has the effect of
removing the delay element from the circuit without having to reposition
the circuit components. This has the result that it is not necessary to
re-position circuit components on the removal of delay elements and then
to re-evaluate the circuit performance. Circuit design can be
significantly improved.
