GCS-Timer: GPU-Accelerated Current Source Model Based Static Timing Analysis

Abstract

Composite Current Source (CCS) timing model plays an important role in modern static timing analysis (STA) because it precisely captures the timing behavior of a design at advanced nodes. However, CCS is extremely time-consuming due to its accurate but complicated timing models. To overcome this challenge, we introduce GCS-Timer, a GPU-accelerated CCS-based timing analysis algorithm. Unlike existing methods that perform model order reduction to trade accuracy for speed, GCS-Timer achieves high accuracy through a fast simulation-based analysis using GPU computing. Experimental results show that GCS-Timer can complete CCS analysis with better accuracy and achieve 3.2X faster runtime compared with a 16-threaded industrial standard timer. The source code is available at https://github.com/cuhk-eda/GCS-Timer.