Interconnects constitute a dominant source of circuit delay for modern chip designs.
The variations of critical dimensions in modern VLSI technologies lead to
variability in interconnect performance that must be fully accounted for in timing
verification. However, handling a multitude of inter-die/intra-die variations and assessing
their impacts on circuit performance can dramatically complicate the timing
analysis.
In this thesis, three practical interconnect delay and slew analysis methods are
presented to facilitate efficient evaluation of wire performance variability. The first
method is described in detail in Chapter III. It harnesses a collection of computationally
efficient procedures and closed-form formulas. By doing so, process variations
are directly mapped into the variability of the output delay and slew. This method
can provide the closed-form formulas of the output delay and slew at any sink node of
the interconnect nets fully parameterized, in-process variations. The second method
is based on adjoint sensitivity analysis and driving point model. It constructs the
driving point model of the driver which drives the interconnect net by using the adjoint
sensitivity analysis method. Then the driving point model can be propagated
through the interconnect network by using the first method to obtain the closedform
formulas of the output delay and slew. The third method is the generalized
second-order adjoint sensitivity analysis. We give the mathematical derivation of this method in Chapter V. The theoretical value of this method is it can not only handle
this particular variational interconnect delay and slew analysis, but it also provides
an avenue for automatical linear network analysis and optimization.
The proposed methods not only provide statistical performance evaluations of
the interconnect network under analysis but also produce delay and slew expressions
parameterized in the underlying process variations in a quadratic parametric form.
Experimental results show that superior accuracy can be achieved by our proposed
methods.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1431 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Ye, Xiaoji |
| Contributors | Li, Peng |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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