Challenges in Evaluations for a Typical-Case Design Methodology

According to the current trend of increasing variations in process technologies and thus in performance, the conservative worst-case design will not work since design margins can not be provided. The authors are investigating a typical-case design methodology, where designers focus on typical cases rather than on rarely-occurring worst cases. On evaluating the typical-case design, accurate circuit delay has to be considered, which is ignored in the current architectural-level simulations. While gate-level simulations consider circuit delay, they require huge amount of simulation time and hence are inappropriate for system designs, where designers examine a wide variety of design choices. In this paper, the authors show the challenges in evaluating designs that are based on the typical-case design methodology, and build a prototype architectural-level simulator, which can estimate circuit delay within tolerable simulation time