Worst-case aggressor-victim alignment with current-source driver models

Crosstalk delay-noise which occurs due to the simultaneous transitions of victim and aggressor drivers is very sensitive to their mutual alignment. Hence, during static noise analysis, it is crucial to identify the worst-case victim-aggressor alignment which results in the maximum delay-noise. Although several approaches have been proposed to obtain the worst-case aggressor alignment, most of them compute only the worst-case stage delay of the victim. However, in reality it is essential to compute the worst-case combined delay of victim stage and victim receiver gate. We propose a heuristic approach to compute the worst-case aggressor alignment which maximizes the victim receiver output arrival time. In this work, we use a novel cumulative gate overdrive voltage (CGOV ) metric to model the victim receiver output transition. HSPICE simulations, performed on industrial nets to validate the proposed methodology, show an average error of 1.7% in delay-noise when compared to the worst-case alignment obtained by an exhaustive sweeping.