Optimization targets

There are, mainly, three target policies in optimizing real circuits: minimize the delay, minimize the power consumption and minimize the area occupancy. In some cases these policies can be conflicting among them, as, for example, minimizing the delay surely increases the circuit area, while ins some cases these policies can go together, as, for example, minimizing the power consumption may lead to a reduction of the area occupancy.

There is another policy that can be considered, especially in the field of sub-micron digital circuit design: the noise reduction; however this requires a good noise model of the circuit, and actually there are a few good ones.

Now we are going to analyze the three principal optimization policies, regarding especially the compatibility with the optimization algorithms of chapter 4.