EventTimer: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Dynamic Timing Analysis

Abstract

As the transistor shrinks to nanoscale, the overhead of ensuring circuit functionality becomes extremely large due to the increasing timing variations. Thus, better-than-worst-case design (BTWC) has attracted more and more attention. Many of these techniques utilize dynamic timing slack (DTS) and activity information for design optimization and runtime tuning. Existing DTS computation methods are essentially a modification to the worst-case delay information, which cannot guarantee exact DTS and activity simulation, causing performance degradation in timing optimization. Therefore, in this paper, we propose EventTimer, a dynamic timing analysis engine based on event propagation to accurately compute DTS and activity information. We evaluate its accuracy and efficiency on different benchmark circuits. The experimental results show that EventTimer can achieve exact DTS computation with high efficiency. And it also proves that EventTimer has good scalability with the circuit scale and the number of CPU threads, which make it possible to be used in the application-level analysis.