How vHelm Delivers an Optimized Clock Network

In a prior post, I discussed how the clock is no longer just another signal at advanced nodes. Indeed, it is the most critical network on the chip. An optimized clock network can be the margin of victory for your next design. But extracting these benefits is challenging. The clock network is quite sensitive, and optimization can come down to finding a few picoseconds buried deep inside the design. ClockEdge has built a pioneering suite of tools to address these challenges.

I discussed the four elements of the ClockEdge Veridian platform in the prior post mentioned above. Timing, power, aging and jitter are all part of the solution. But integrating the massive information associated with these elements of the design to find the right balance is another hurdle. This is where the command center for the Veridian platform takes over, providing the required integrated perspective. Let’s examine how vHelm delivers an optimized clock network.

Unlocking Insights with a Shift-Left Strategy

Thanks to SPICE-accurate visibility and fast virtual ECO loops, clock optimization can now be done early with a shift-left approach. Moving clock optimization from a late-stage emergency to an early-stage process that improves PPA across the entire design can produce a substantial positive impact for any design team.

The full-network SPICE accuracy delivered by Veridian reveals timing distortion, duty cycle imbalance, jitter sensitivity, and aging drift that corner-based STA approaches fail to capture. There are many positive impacts as a result. Here are a few:

• • Early visibility into dynamic timing behavior. SPICE-accurate timing analysis exposes real rail-to-rail behavior, including degraded swing, coupling-driven distortion, and asymmetric PVT effects that STA routinely smooths over.
  • Jitter understanding, when it matters most. Clock jitter at advanced nodes is dominated by power delivery network (PDN) noise. Gate switching currents, bump-level voltage droop, and multi-domain noise profiles create sub-picosecond accurate jitter that only transient simulation can reveal.
  • Early power optimization. Clock networks consume a large share of total power. With a virtual ECO, designers can tune buffers, topologies, and sizing while there is still room to make changes without impacting the schedule.
  • Lower sign-off risk. Once early optimization is in place, sign-off stops being a hunt for surprises. Design teams arrive at the final stage with fewer iterations, tighter margins, and higher confidence.

vHelm Puts it All Together

What makes vHelm different? Here are a few examples:

Sign-off grade accuracy, available early: The Veridian platform traces the full clock network, generates a SPICE netlist, and runs transient simulation fast with patented technology that can scale to millions of gates..

Virtual ECO enables rapid iteration: Change a constraint, resize a buffer, or adjust topology and see the SPICE-accurate impact across the clock network. This replaces the slow trial-and-error cycle of late-stage ECOs with a tight optimization loop that actually fits the schedule.

One interface. One flow. One source of truth.

vHelm consolidates:

• Timing visualization
• Jitter margins
• Power consumption
• Rail-to-rail behavior
• Aging impact

No patchwork of point tools or stitched-together STA, simulators, and debug utilities.. It is a unified flow by design.

Designed for early leverage, not late rescue: The goal is not just catching issues. It is reshaping architecture, buffering strategy, and margin allocation at a time when these choices still influence PPA.

And here are some reasons why early optimization directly improves sign-off:

Fewer surprises: Teams that shift left find that sign-off paths often validate changes, not expose them.

Tighter PPA: With accurate SPICE insights, designers remove unnecessary guard-bands and reclaim performance or power margin without increasing risk. 

Higher reliability over product lifetime: Aging-aware analysis reveals long-term drift in edge behavior. Fixing these issues early prevents latent field failures and improves yield.

Measurable schedule predictability: Virtual ECO replaces uncertainty with controlled iteration.

I have just touched on a few of the many capabilities vHelm offers design teams for early clock network optimization. Below is a screen shot of the interface, illustrating the many parameters on the left that vHelm is tracking and some of the analysis that can be applied to these parameters on the right to find the right path to an optimal clock network.

To Learn More

What is becoming clear is this: advanced-node clocks cannot be modeled accurately enough with abstractions alone. Teams can either continue treating accuracy as something addressed at the end or use it as an opportunity at the start of the design.

vHelm exists for teams who choose the second path. If you are responsible for clocking in an advanced SoC, vHelm can help to answer one question: how much margin am I leaving on the table? You can learn more about the ClockEdge Veridian platform and the impact of vHelm here.  And that’s how vHelm delivers an optimized clock network.