Improved monitoring-path selection algorithm for suspicious timing error prediction based timing speculation

As process technology is scaling down, timing speculation techniques such as Razor and STEP are emerged as alternative solutions to reduce required margins due to various variation effects. Unlike Razor, STEP is a prediction-based timing speculation method to predict suspicious timing errors before they really appear, and thus it can result in more performance improvement. Therefore, an improved monitoring-path selection algorithm for STEP-based timing speculation is proposed in this paper, in which candidate monitoring-paths are selected based on short path removement and path length estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm realizes an average of 1.71X overclocking compared with worst-case based designs.