Statistical timing based optimization using gate sizing

The increased dominance of intra-die process variations has motivated the field of statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) and has raised the need for SSTA-based circuit optimization. We propose a new sensitivity based, statistical gate sizing method. Since brute-force computation of the change in circuit delay distribution to gate size change is computationally expensive, we propose an efficient and exact pruning algorithm. The pruning algorithm is based on a novel theory of perturbation bounds which are shown to decrease as they propagate through the circuit. This allows pruning of gate sensitivities without complete propagation of their perturbations. We apply our proposed optimization algorithm to ISCAS benchmark circuits and demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Our results show an improvement of up to 10.5% in the 99-percentile circuit delay for the same circuit area, using the proposed statistical optimizer and a run time improvement of up to 56× compared to the brute-force approach.