Statistical Timing Analysis With Coupling

  • Authors:
  • Debjit Sinha;Hai Zhou

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

As technology scales to smaller dimensions, increasing process variations and coupling induced delay variations make timing verification extremely challenging. In this paper, the authors establish a theoretical framework for statistical timing analysis with coupling. They prove the convergence of their proposed iterative approach and discuss implementation issues under the assumption of a Gaussian distribution for the parameters of variation. A statistical timer based on their proposed approach is developed and experimental results are presented for the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems benchmarks. They juxtapose their timer with a single pass, noniterative statistical timer that does not consider the mutual dependence of coupling with timing, and another statistical timer that handles coupling deterministically. Monte Carlo simulations reveal a distinct gain (up to 24%) in accuracy by their approach in comparison to the others mentioned