Compact current source models for timing analysis under temperature and body bias variations

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

State-of-the-art timing tools are built around the use of current source models (CSMs), which have proven to be fast and accurate in enabling the analysis of large circuits. As circuits become increasingly exposed to process and temperature variations, there is a strong need to augment these models to account for thermal effects and for the impact of adaptive body biasing, a compensatory technique that is used to overcome on-chip variations. However, a straightforward extension of CSMs to incorporate timing analysis at multiple body biases and temperatures results in unreasonably large characterization tables for each cell. We propose a new approach to compactly capture body bias and temperature effects within a mainstream CSM framework. Our approach features a table reduction method for compaction of tables and a fast and novel waveform sensitivity method for timing evaluation under any body bias and temperature condition. On a 45-nm technology, we demonstrate high accuracy, with mean errors of under 4% in both slew and delay as compared to HSPICE. We show a speedup of over five orders of magnitude over HSPICE and a speedup of about 92 × over conventional CSMs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number6054046
Pages (from-to)2104-2117
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume20
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received October 18, 2010; revised May 06, 2011; accepted September 03, 2011. Date of publication October 19, 2011; date of current version July 27, 2012. This work was supported in part by the SRC under Contract 2007-TJ-1572 and by the NSF under Award CCF-1017778.

Keywords

  • Body bias
  • current source models
  • delay
  • temperature

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