iTimerC 2.0: Fast Incremental Timing and CPPR Analysis

Abstract

To achieve timing closure, performance-driven optimizations are repeatedly performed throughout the modern IC design flow. Along with these optimization operations, how to incrementally update timing information efficiently and accurately becomes a crucial task for fast turnaround time. On the other hand, to avoid wasteful over-optimization, clock path pessimism should be removed during timing analysis. In order to provide prompt timing information without over-pessimism during iterative optimizations, in this paper, we aim at fast incremental timing and CPPR analysis. We present two delicate techniques, lazy evaluation and lazy propagation, to avoid redundant updates. Our experiments are conducted on the benchmark suite released by TAU 2015 timing analysis contest. Experimental results show that our timer delivers the best results in terms of accuracy, runtime, and memory over all participating teams.