Finding the longest delay paths for the array-form multipliers using a genetic algorithm

Abstract

Traditional digital multipliers are often designed in array forms or other variants. Timing of array-form multipliers can be analyzed by static timing analysis (STA), but the obtained timing result is conservative and pessimistic. Although statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) can partly solve the pessimism, it still does not generate test patterns for those near-to-longest delay paths. Finding near-to-longest delay paths can be helpful to designing error tolerant circuits, with which aggressive timing (with timing violation) can be exploited. In such design scenarios one should find test vectors to activate those near-to-longest delay paths in order to further run SPICE-precision diagnose on those potential timing violating critical paths. Test vector generation for such a testing problem is essentially an exhaustive enumeration problem when dealing with different forms of array multipliers. However, large size multipliers would result in an extremely large enumeration space for finding the longest delay path (LDP) test vectors. Currently there is no deterministic method that can guarantee to find test vectors for exact LDPs of a large size multiplier. Only very few research papers have addressed this problem, proposals are limited to heuristic methods without guarantee of finding the LDPs with the testing vectors. This paper investigates the potential of a genetic algorithm (GA) for searching the extensive test pattern space. By a fine design of GA, experimental running shows that a combination of well tuned evolutionary operators does empower the possibility of finding the LDPs for a set of moderate size carry-save adders (CSA) multipliers with the wordlength (WL) up to 25 bits on a plain laptop computer. Statistical properties of the proposed GA are examined.