In Vivado, one way to cleanup timing after final place & route is to unplace the cells in the worst negative slack path and just place & route that portion. I have had great success with this in the GUI flow. It’s quite easy there. You just do a timing report (report_timing_summary), right-click on the timing path and say unplace cells. Then you run the cleanup commands.

Of course it’s tedious to do this manually but one has to find all the cells involved in a timing path. Here is what I came up with:

set string [report_timing -no_header -path_type full -return_string]
set items [split string]
foreach item $items {if [regexp {TOP\/.*$} item] {lappend cells [get_cells -filter {IS_PRIMITIVE==1} -of_objects [get_pins $item]]))

So here we get a timing report, find all fields in it then if the item starts with our TOP module name, we assume it’s a pin name and get the cell of that pin. This finds some of the same cells twice but unplacing an already unplaced cell is fine so we don’t have to worry about duplicates.

Finally one can do

unplace_cell $cells
place_design -directive Explore
route_design -directive Explore
route_design -tns_cleanup
phys_opt_design -directive Explore
for final rip & re-route stage. I usually get very good timing results from this.