S. Abbaspour
M. Pedram
ABSTRACT
This paper describes an efficient threshold-based filtering algorithm (TFA) for calculating the interconnect delay and slew (transition time) in high-speed VLSI circuits. The key idea is to divide the circuit nets into three groups of low, medium and high complexity nets, whereby for low and medium complexity nets either the first moment of the impulse response or the first and second moments are used. For the high-complexity nets, which are encountered infrequently, TFA resorts to the AWE method. The key contribution of the paper is to come up with very effective and efficient way of classifying the nets into these three groups. Experimental results show that on a large industrial circuit using a state-of-the-art commercial timing analysis that incorporates TFA, we were able to achieve delay and slew estimation accuracies that are quite comparable with the full-blown AWE-based calculators at runtimes that were only 14% higher than those of a simple Elmore-delay calculator.
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Index Terms
- TFA: a threshold-based filtering algorithm for propagation delay and slew calculation of high-speed VLSI interconnects
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