Fast interconnect and gate timing analysis for performance optimization

Authors:
Soroush Abbaspour;Massoud Pedram;Amir Ajami;Chandramouli Kashyap
Affiliations:
IBM Corporation, Hopewell Junction, NY;Department of Electrical Engineering Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Magma Design Automation, Santa Clara, CA;Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Year:
2006

Citing 7
Cited 1

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Abstract

Static timing analysis is a key step in the physical design optimization of VLSI designs. The lumped capacitance model for gate delay and the Elmore model for wire delay have been shown to be inadequate for wire-dominated designs. Using the effective capacitance model for the gate delay calculation and model-order reduction techniques for wire delay calculation is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present sufficiently accurate and highly efficient filtering algorithms for interconnect timing as well as gate timing analysis. The key idea is to partition the circuit into low and high complexity Circuits, whereby low complexity circuits are handled with efficient algorithms such as total capacitance algorithm for gate delay and the Elmore metric for wire delay and high complexity circuits are handled with sign-off algorithms. Experimental results on microprocessor designs show accuracies that are quite comparable with sign-off delay calculators with more than of 65% reduction in the computation times.