Accurate Delay Estimation in the Presence of Coupling Noise using Complete Waveform Accuracy

The commonly used switch factor (SF) based delay analysis can not provide an accurate delay value at the presence of coupling noise especially when aggressor signal arrives after the victim signal have passed the threshold voltage. Therefore, full waveform accuracy must be used to accurately predict the signal delay. In this paper, a closed form expression of the output waveform is derived for the coupled interconnects. Then based on this expression, an efficient Newton-Raphson iteration method is proposed to estimate the signal delay at the presence of coupling noise. It is shown that the proposed method can accurately estimate the delay in the presence of coupling and successfully bound this value even when there are multiple aggressor nets.