TAU 2015 contest on incremental timing analysis

Among timing analysis applications, timing-driven operations are imperative for the success of optimization flows, such as placement, routing, logic synthesis, and physical synthesis. Optimization transforms change the design, and therefore have the potential to significantly affect timing information. As such, timing must be kept current to ensure slack integrity and timing closure. For reasonable turnaround and performance, the timer should incrementally update the affected portion of the design. The aim of the TAU 2015 timing contest is to seek novel ideas for incremental timing analysis by: (i) introducing the concept and motivating the importance of incremental timing analysis, (ii) encourage novel parallelization techniques (including multi-threading), and (iii) facilitating the creation of an incremental timing analysis framework with benchmarks to further advance this research area.