As technology scales to smaller dimensions, increasing process variations, coupling induced delay variations and multiple input switching effects make timing verification extremely challenging. In this paper, we establish a theoretical framework for statistical timing analysis with coupling and multiple input switching. We prove the convergence of our proposed iterative approach and discuss implementation issues under the assumption of a Gaussian distribution for the parameters of variation. A statistical timer based on our proposed approach is developed and experimental results are presented for the IS-CAS benchmarks. We juxtapose our timer with a single pass, non iterative 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 our approach in comparison to the others mentioned.
['Debjit Sinha', 'Hai Zhou']
A unified framework for statistical timing analysis with coupling and multiple input switching