iTimerC: Common Path Pessimism Removal Using Effective Reduction Methods

Abstract

Static timing analysis is a key process to guarantee timing closure for modern IC designs. Nevertheless, fast growing design complexities and increasing on-chip variations complicate this process. To capture more accurate timing performance of a design, common path pessimism removal is prevalent to eliminate artificially induced pessimism in clock paths during timing analysis. To avoid exhaustive exploration on all paths in a design, in this paper, we present a novel timing analysis framework removing common path pessimism based on block-based static timing analysis, timing graph reduction, and dynamic bounding. Experimental results show that the proposed method is highly scalable, especially with short runtimes for large-scale designs. Moreover, our approach outperforms TAU 2014 timing contest winners, generating accurate results and achieving more than 2.13X speedups.