Statistical Timing Analysis With Coupling

摘要

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