Cell characterization for noise stability

Abstract

Verifying whether a digital standard-cell design is functional in the presence of interconnect coupling noise is an important concern to ASIC designers. Determining whether the coupling noise occurring on a node is excessive requires comparing this noise against the dynamic noise margins of the receiving gates. The noise stability requirement, introduced in the context of transistor-level static noise analysis, is a technique for quantifying these AC noise margins. In this paper, we describe a technique for modelling noise stability in the form of a four-parameter rule which can be used to characterize the cells of a digital standard-cell library.