A fast and accurate approach for common path pessimism removal in static timing analysis

Abstract

The dual-mode delay model, while being effective for characterizing on-chip timing variations, also yields timing analysis results that are overly pessimistic due to the Common Path Pessimism (CPP). In this paper, we develop a fast and accurate block-based algorithm for removing this pessimism in timing analysis, when the dual-mode delay model is used. We illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on a set of benchmarks from the TAU 2014 Contest [1].