Statistical timing analysis of combinational circuits

Abstract

The authors develop efficient methods for computing an exact probability distribution of the delay of a combinational circuit, given probability distributions for the gate and wire delays. The derived distribution can give the probability that a combinational circuit will achieve a certain performance, across the possible range. The techniques target fast analysis as well as reduced memory requirements. The authors define a notion of falsity of paths when dealing with probability distributions on gate and wire delays, and they give methods for identifying and ignoring false paths in their probabilistic analysis, so as to obtain correct and accurate answers to the performance prediction question. Some results and comparisons are given for a number of combinational circuit benchmarks.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>