Efficient identification of crosstalk induced slowdown targets

This paper deals with filter development in XIDEN, a "pruning " tool used to identify crosstalk targets that can potentially create Boolean errors. XIDEN employs multiple tools to adoptively estimate and/or extract electrical parameters required by its filters, and uses a novel approach to construct an efficient sequence of extractors and filters that are applied to a circuit. Thus, an initially enormous collection of targets can usually be reduced to a very small set of targets via a vectorless process. This process flow is much more efficient than using ATPG without pruning to identify targets that represent faults. The XIDEN framework, including the filters that capture the effect of crosstalk-induced pulses, has been previously presented. In this paper, our focus is on filters associated with crosstalk induced slowdown targets. To accurately compute timing information associated with signal transitions, we have enhanced the XIDEN framework with enhanced static timing analysis procedures that take into consideration single and multiple capacitive crosstalk couplings in a circuit.