Bounded Transactional Timing Analysis

Abstract

Modern physical synthesis flows operate on very large designs and perform increasingly aggressive timing optimizations. Traditional incremental timing analysis now represents the single greatest bottleneck in such optimizations and is lacking in features necessary to support them efficiently. We describe a paradigm of transactional timing analysis, which, in addition to incremental updates, offers an efficient, nested undo functionality that does not require significant timing calculations. This paradigm extends traditional incremental Static timing analysis (STA) and enables necessary infrastructure for multiple physical synthesis optimizations in this book.