Switching activity analysis considering spatiotemporal correlations
ICCAD '94 Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Automated multi-cycle symbolic timing verification of microprocessor-based designs
DAC '94 Proceedings of the 31st annual Design Automation Conference
Performance optimization using exact sensitization
DAC '94 Proceedings of the 31st annual Design Automation Conference
False path exclusion in delay analysis of RTL-based datapath-controller designs
EURO-DAC '96/EURO-VHDL '96 Proceedings of the conference on European design automation
Waiting false path analysis of sequential logic circuits for performance optimization
Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Exploiting multi-cycle false paths in the performance optimization of sequential circuits
ICCAD '92 Proceedings of the 1992 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Multi-clock path analysis using propositional satisfiability
ASP-DAC '00 Proceedings of the 2000 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
POPL '77 Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages
An implication-based method to detect multi-cycle paths in large sequential circuits
Proceedings of the 39th annual Design Automation Conference
Enhancing the performance of multi-cycle path analysis in an industrial setting
Proceedings of the 2004 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Efficient identification of multi-cycle false path
ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
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Accurate timing analysis is crucial for obtaining the optimal clock frequency, and for other design stages such as power analysis. Most methods for estimating propagation delay identify multi-cycle paths (MCPs), which allow timing to be relaxed, but ignore the set of reachable states, achieving scalability at the cost of a severe lack of precision. Even simple circuits contain paths affecting timing that can only be detected if the set of reachable states is considered. We examine the theoretical foundations of MCP identification and characterise the MCPs in a circuit by a fixed point equation. The optimal solution to this equation can be computed iteratively and yields the largest set of MCPs in a circuit. Further, we define conservative approximations of this set, show how different MCP identification methods in the literature compare in terms of precision, and show one method to be unsound. The practical application of these results is a new method to detect multi-cycle paths using techniques for computing invariants in a circuit. Our implementation performs well on several benchmarks, including an exponential improvement on circuits analysed in the literature.