Accurate Estimation of Dynamic Timing Slacks using Event-Driven Simulation

Dimitrios Garyfallou1, Ioannis Tsiokanos2, Nestor Evmorfopoulos1, Georgios Stamoulis1, Georgios Karakonstantis2
1University of Thessaly, 2Queen's University Belfast


Abstract

The pessimistic nature of conventional static timing analysis has turned the attention of many studies to the exploitation of the dynamic data-dependent excitation of paths. Such studies may have revealed extensive dynamic timing slacks (DTS), however, they rely on frameworks that inherently make worst-case assumptions and still ignore some data-dependent timing properties. This may cause significant DTS underestimation, leading to unexploited frequency scaling margins and incorrect timing failure estimation. In this paper, we develop a framework based on event-driven timing simulation that identifies the underestimated DTS, and evaluate its gains on various post-place-and-route designs. Experimental results show that our event-driven simulation scheme achieves on average 2.35% and up-to 194.51% DTS improvement over conventional graph-based techniques. When compared to existing frequency scaling schemes, the proposed approach enables us to further increase the clock frequency by up-to 10.42%. We also demonstrate that our approach can reveal that timing failures may be up-to 2.94x less than the ones estimated by existing failure estimation techniques, under potential variation-induced delay increase.