Effective Corner-Based Techniques for Variation-Aware IC Timing Verification

Traditional integrated circuit timing sign-off consists of verifying a design for a set of carefully chosen combinations of process and operating parameter extremes, referred to as corners. Such corners are usually chosen based on the knowledge of designers and process engineers, and are expected to cover the worst-case fabrication and operating scenarios. With increasingly more detailed attention to variability, the number of potential conditions to examine can be exponentially large, more than is possible to handle with straightforward exhaustive analysis. This paper presents efficient yet exact techniques for computing worst-delay and worst-slack corners of combinational and sequential digital integrated circuits. Results show that the proposed techniques enable efficient and accurate detection of failing conditions while accounting for timing variability due to process variations.