Synopsys, Inc.

Loa Mize

Subramanyam Sripada

Cho Moon

Qiuyang Wu

Sonia Singhal

Brian Clerkin

Kayhan Küçükçakar

Andrew J Seigel

Steve Hollands

Timing behaviors associated with constraints of circuits are compared to identify mismatches between circuit configurations. Aggregate sets of timing constraints associated with timing nodes are determined for timing paths between start points and end points. Precedence rules are applied to aggregate sets of timing constraints by applying precedence rules to interacting timing constraints. Aggregate sets of constraints for corresponding timing nodes are matched to determine if timing constraint mismatches exist between circuits. If aggregate timing constraints associated with start point, end point pairs are found to match, reconvergent points between the start point and end points are analyzed to see if aggregate constraints of timing nodes connected to reconvergent/divergent points match if timing exception matches are involved. Graph traversal algorithms allow efficient computation of aggregate timing constraints for timing nodes.

Comparing timing constraints of circuits

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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Tigard, OR, United States of America

Loa Mize