A new statistical approach to timing analysis of VLSI circuits

In this paper a new problem definition of statistical timing analysis is formulated. Two efficient methods that consider only dominant long paths are employed to approach this problem. The influence of the correlation of node delays on the probability distribution of the longest path delay is studied in detail. The experimental results show that the probability distribution of the longest path delay is greatly influenced by the correlation of nodes and by the presence of many dominant long paths. The results also show that the probability distribution obtained by our approaches is well tracked to the distribution obtained by the whole circuit simulation with much less computation time