Crosstalk-aware signal probability-based dynamic statistical timing analysis

Crosstalk is an increasingly significant effect for VLSI timing performance. Traditional STA or SSTA techniques provide pessimistic crosstalk analysis based on timing window envelopes. In this paper, we present input-aware signal probability-based statistical timing analysis (SPSTA) taking crosstalk-induced delay variations into account. SPSTA achieves reduced pessimism and improved accuracy by signal propagation path/network-based timing analysis and leveraging some existing automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) techniques. Our experiments based on the 45nm Nangate open cell library show that compared with 1.35 million Monte Carlo simulation runs, while PrimeTime-SI over-estimates by 14.64%, 16.39% and 19.69%, SSTA achieves an average of 2.85%, 2.89% and 3.59% inaccuracy, and SPSTA achieves an average of 1.85%, 2.54% and 1.53% inaccuracy in crosstalk-oblivious, crosstalk-aware non-iterative and crosstalk-aware iterative analysis, respectively.