A unified Multi-Corner Multi-Mode static timing analysis engine
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Jing-Jia Nian; Shih-Heng Tsai; Chung-Yang Huang
- Source
- 2010 15th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), 2010 15th Asia and South Pacific. :669-674 Jan, 2010
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Timing
Engines
Delay estimation
Runtime
Space technology
Signal processing
Robustness
Circuit testing
Very large scale integration
Voltage
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-6961
2153-697X
In this paper, we proposed a unified Multi-Corner Multi-Mode (MCMM) static timing analysis (STA) engine that can efficiently compute the worst-case delay of the process corners in various very large scaled circuits. Our key contributions include: (1) a seamless integration of the path-and parameter-based branch-and-bound algorithms so that the engine is very robust for different kinds of circuits, (2) an improved search space pruning technique, (3) a simple yet efficient critical path delay bound for the initial search space pruning. Our experimental results show that our engine can significantly outperform the prior MCMM STA approaches in various benchmark circuits with different number of process parameters.