Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition (DATE'03)
Transistor-Level Static Timing Analysis by Piecewise Quadratic Waveform Matching
Munich, Germany
March 03-March 07
ISBN: 0-7695-1870-2
While fast timing analysis methods, such as asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE), have been well established for linear circuits, the timing analysis for non-linear circuits, which are dominant in digital CMOS circuits, is usually performed by a SPICE like, time domain integration based approach, involving expensive Newton Raphson iterations at numerous time steps. In this paper, we propose a new technique that leads to the transient solution of charge/discharge paths with a complexity equivalent to only K DC operating point calculations, where K is the number of transistors along the path. This is accomplished by approximating each nodal voltage as a piecewise quadratic waveform, whose characteristics can be determined by matching the charge/discharge currents. Experiments on a wide range of circuits show that a 31.6 times speed-up over SPICE transient simulation with 10ps step size can be achieved, while maintaining an average accuracy of 99%.
Citation:
Zhong Wang, Jianwen Zhu, "Transistor-Level Static Timing Analysis by Piecewise Quadratic Waveform Matching," date, vol. 1, pp.11026, Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition (DATE'03), 2003