FA-STAC: A Framework for Fast and Accurate Static Timing Analysis with Coupling

This paper presents a framework for fast and accurate static timing analysis considering coupling. With technology scaling to smaller dimensions, the impact of coupling induced delay variations can no longer be ignored. Timing analysis considering coupling is iterative, and can have considerably larger run-times than a single pass approach. We propose a novel and accurate coupling delay model, and present techniques to increase the convergence rate of timing analysis when complex coupling models are employed. Experimental results obtained for the ISCAS benchmarks show promising accuracy improvements using our coupling model while an efficient iteration scheme shows significant speedup (up to 62.1%) in comparison to traditional approaches.