As mentioned in our other post, Is Violation of Retention Flip-Flop Clock Parking a Real Issue, clock parked low is normally a requirement for retention flip flops for them to retain value properly during power down sleep. Here is a typical implementation of retention FF. Note the “AND” gate is NOT inside retention FF. As a matter of fact, this “AND” gate is actually a power isolation low cell and RETAIN# is active low iso enable signal. The “CLK” signal, input to AND/isolow cell, is required to be parked low before sleep or before RETAIN# is asserted low.
Let’s take a look of a very simple scenario. There is a clock source at chip top level. Its clk output is wired to core0 and core1. Inside core0 we add a ICG cell, clock gating cell, to gate off clock before sleep.
A typical ICG cell works as below.
But using this ICG cell in above simple use case does NOT work. Next we will discuss why and several ways to resolve it.
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