Statistical leakage power modelling of manufacturing process variations at system level

Process variation has become a major issue in system performance estimation as the technology feature size continues to decrease. This paper proposes a statistical methodology to bring the process variation effects from process level up to system level in terms of circuit leakage power dissipation. A cell library has been built which offers a rapid analysis of process variation effects on system leakage power performance. As a demonstration vehicle for this technique, the leakage power distribution of a micropipeline circuit has been simulated using this cell library. The experimental results show that the proposed method is much faster than the traditional statistical power analysis (SPA) approach by a factor of 150; the results are also compared with Monte Carlo simulation data for validation purposes, and show an acceptable error rate of within 5% and in most cases less than 3%.