Full-circuit SPICE simulation based validation of dynamic delay estimation

Power supply noise may have big impacts on the design performance in the latest technologies. Accurately mapping the IR-drop effect to real delay is a challenging task, which will directly impact the accuracy of IR-drop related performance evaluation, test, and diagnosis. In this paper, we first present our previous work on setting up an IR2Delay database for addressing this issue. We then propose a flow to validate this database by comparing it with full-circuit SPICE simulation results. In this flow, mixed-signal simulation is used, which can reuse the existing digital testbench as stimuli while maintaining the accuracy of SPICE simulation.