Victim alignment in crosstalk aware timing analysis

Modeling the effect of coupling noise on circuit delay is a key issue in static timing analysis (STA) and involves the “victimaggressor alignment” problem. As delay-noise depends strongly on the skew between the victim-aggressor input transitions’, it is not possible to apriori identify the victim input transition that results in the latest arrival time at the victim. Several approaches that heuristically search for the worst-case victim-aggressor alignment have been proposed in literature. In this paper we present an analytical result that obviates the need to search for the worst-case victim input transition, thereby simplifying the victim-aggressor alignment problem significantly. Using the properties of standard nonlinear CMOS drivers, we show that regardless of the switching of the aggressors, the worst-case victim input transition is the one that switches at the latest point in its timing window. Although this result has been empirically observed in the industry, to the be...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Ravikishore Gandikota, Kaviraj Chopra, David Blaauw, Dennis Sylvester, Murat R. Becer, Joao Geada
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 2007, Input Transition, Victim Input Transition, Worst-case Victim Input