Considering Crosstalk Effects in Statistical Timing Analysis

Abstract

The impact of crosstalk effects on timing performance is increasing as the device geometries are shrinking. As a consequence, crosstalk effects need to be considered in statistical timing analysis for higher accuracy. In this letter, the statistical interconnect delay due to crosstalk effects is calculated based on a piecewise linear delay change curve model (PLDM), which enables fast closed-form analytical delay evaluation. The PLDM-based method is independent of the delay change characteristics and is able to handle both Gaussian and non-Gaussian input skew distributions. The proposed method can be integrated into a statistical timing analyzer with runtime proportional to the number of samples for PLDM characterization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate the delay mean and standard deviation for coupled RC interconnects at PTM 65-nm technology with errors better than -0.07% and -1.23%, respectively, with only 20 samples for PLDM characterization. In addition, the proposed method typically achieves two to three orders of magnitude speedup compared to Monte Carlo simulations.