STAX: Statistical Crosstalk Target Set Compaction

This paper presents STAX, a crosstalk target set compaction framework to reduce the complexity of the crosstalk ATPG process by pruning non-fault-producing targets. In general, existing pruning techniques do not employ their processes in a cost-effective manner. Neither do they handle process variations properly. To address the first weakness, this paper presents a framework to determine a sequence of available analysis and pruning tool invocations to prune as many of the crosstalk targets as fast as possible. As a result, an initially enormous collection of crosstalk targets is usually reduced to a very small set of targets via a vectorless process. A statistical static timing analyzer is developed and embedded to address the second shortcoming of existing approaches. Experimental results on ISCAS´85 benchmark demonstrate that STAX greatly improves the runtime compared to other crosstalk target pruning methodologies, including ATPG, with no prior target set compaction