Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Yuri Geogdjaev

Etai Wagner

Ilan Shusterman

Lev Makovsky

A voltage droop detection circuit can be used to detect a voltage droop in an integrated circuit (IC) device. The voltage droop detection circuit may include a chain of inverting stages, and each inverting stage may include a P-type transistor and an N-type transistor. The chain of inverting stages can be initialized to alternating logic states during an initialization phase of a clock cycle, and an evaluation pulse can be inputted into the chain of inverting stages during an evaluation phase of the clock cycle. A voltage droop may be detected if a number of inverting stages that are able to switch output logic states from their respective initialized logic states is smaller than a nominal value indicating a number of inverting stages that are able to switch their respective output logic states under normal voltage condition.

Voltage droop detection using inverting stages

To check the timing of a signal path involving an integrated circuit block from an outside vendor, a signal path including a driver circuit, an interconnect, and a receiver circuit can be identified in the integrated circuit design. A substitute integrated circuit design can be generated by replacing the driver circuit of the signal path with a primitive standard library cell, providing parasitic parameters of the interconnect in a format compatible with a static timing analysis tool, and replacing the receiver circuit with one or more capacitors. A static timing analysis tool can then be executed on the substitute integrated circuit design to determine whether a propagation delay from the driver circuit to the receiver circuit of the signal path satisfies a timing requirement of the integrated circuit design.

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Netanya, Israel

Yuri Geogdjaev