Paper Review: Statistical Timing Analysis: From Basic Principles to State of the Art

Abstract

Static-timing analysis (STA) has been one of the most pervasive and successful analysis engines in the design of digital circuits for the last 20 years. However, in recent years, the in- creased loss of predictability in semiconductor devices has raised concern over the ability of STA to effectively model statistical variations. This has resulted in extensive research in the so-called statistical STA (SSTA), which marks a significant departure from the traditional STAframework. In this paper,we review the recent developments in SSTA. We first discuss its underlying models and assumptions, then survey the major approaches, and close by discussing its remaining key challenges.

Paper Location

IEEEXplore

Citation

[1] D. Blaauw, K. Chopra, A. Srivastava, and L. Scheffer, "Statistical Timing Analysis: From Basic Principles to State of the Art," IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 27, 2008, pp. 589-607.

Positive

• Extremely clear problem set, and types of problems presented in categories.
• Very classic style of essay writing common to a more literature-background in the format of telling the audience what is about to be discussed, discussing it, and then recapping the same points.  It's an effective way of getting information off to your audience.
• Use of rigorous mathematical constructs when defining a 'path' from the source to sink.
• The paper presents what effectively appears like a reasonable literary overview of the field related to STA both DSTA and SSTA.
• Extremely large body of referenced work.

Negative

• Figure 5 is incorrect.  the ro of uncorrelated, partially correlated and fully correlated should be different
• Graphs in Figure 10 (a,b,c) fail to label either axis, which is bad form.
• There is a great deal of non-obvious terminology in use here, even assuming a stochastic processes background.  Things such as KLE and "moment matching" should have some basic definitions.