Analyzing the risk of timing modeling based on path delay tests.

Abstract

As technology scales, it is becoming increasingly difficult for simulation and timing models to accurately predict silicon timing behavior. When a collection of chips fail in timing in a similar way, diagnosis and silicon debug look to find the root-causes for the failure. However, little work has been done to develop a methodology that looks for useful design information in the good-chip data. This paper describes a path-based methodology that correlates measured path delays from the good chips, to the path delays predicted by timing analysis. We explain how to utilize this methodology for evaluating the risk of timing modeling.