Fast STA prediction-based gate-level timing simulation

Abstract

Traditional dynamic simulation with standard delay format (SDF) back-annotation cannot be reliably performed on large designs. The large size of SDF files makes the event-driven timing simulation extremely slow as it has to process an excessive number of events. In order to accelerate gate-level timing simulation we propose an automated fast prediction-based gatelevel timing simulation that combines static timing analysis (STA) at the block level with dynamic timing simulation at the I/O interfaces. We demonstrate that the proposed timing simulation can be done earlier in the design cycle in parallel with synthesis.