A Simple Statistical Timing Analysis Flow and Its Application to Timing Margin Evaluation

Abstract

The increase of within-die variations and design margins is creating a need for statistical design methods. This paper proposes a simple statistical timing analysis method considering the lot to lot process shifts occurring during production. This method is first validated for 90nm and 65nm processes. Finally, this statistical timing analysis is applied on basic ring oscillators to evaluate the timing margins introduced at the design level by the traditional corner based approach.