Synopsys, Inc.

Brian Clerkin

Qiuyang Wu

Subramanyam Sripada

Feroze P Taraporevala

Jinfeng Liu

Loa Mize

Kayhan Küçükçakar

Andrew J Seigel

Steve Hollands

In a STA method, after accessing data sets regarding the IC, vectors of the data sets for STA can be generated. Each vector can include a base value and a plurality of tokens, wherein each token is quantized. For each vector, the data of the vector can be adjusted. Adjusting can include shifting a predetermined token to zero and adjusting the base value and remaining token values based on the shifting. Incremental compression can be applied within the vector by storing each token value as a difference versus its previous token value. Differential compression can then be applied by storing each token value as a difference versus a corresponding token value in a predetermined reference vector. A resulting vector can be stored. At this point, an operation for STA can be performed using multiple resulting vectors without de-quantizing or decompressing.

Efficient data compression for vector-based static timing analysis

Partitioning of a design allows static timing analysis (STA), signal integrity, and noise analysis to be performed in parallel on multiple, less demanding, and more available hardware resources. Therefore, runtime and throughput of the analysis can be significantly shortened. Notably, the partitioning can include redundancy. That is, partitions are allowed to share objects in order to preserve the timing path completeness and design structural integrity. Due to this redundancy, these partitions can account for many constraints specifically imposed by STA and ensure minimal inter-partition data dependency during the analysis. Once these partitions are populated, analysis can be performed on those partitions in parallel to generate the same timing results as if the design had been analyzed flat as a single unit. Therefore, the performance of the analysis can be optimized without compromising the accuracy and quality of results.

Path preserving design partitioning with redundancy

Static timing analysis attempts to exhaustively analyze all critical paths of a design. With ever decreasing geometries and ever increasing design complexity, manually identifying timing violations with standard static timing analysis can be very complex and time consuming. A static timing analysis tool can advantageously manage multiple runs having different modes and corners and automatically merge the results generated by the runs. The STA tool can perform the runs either in parallel or in series. Advantageously, the STA tool can save the full timing analysis generated by each run and then extract information from these saved results to form merged results for the design. These merged results can provide different levels of analysis coverage, supply path information at various levels of detail, allow selectable accessibility to information, and highlight propagation of timing changes/violations in the design.

System and method for providing distributed static timing analysis with merged results

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Brian Clerkin