A method and apparatus for rapidly selecting types of buffers which are inserted in the clock tree for high-speed VLSI design is disclosed. The developed tool can be embedded in the existing clock tree synthesis design flow to ensure minimizing the clock delay and satisfying the clock skew constrains. Given the clock tree netlist, the inserted buffers location information, the wire electrical parameters and a buffers timing library, the components delay (buffer delay and wire delay) of the clock tree can be calculated first. Then, for each I/O pin, the path delay, the clock delay and the clock skew can be obtained. Finally, using the method, a modified clock tree netlist satisfying the timing specifications can be constructed.