Technique for Efficient Evaluation of SRAM Timing Failure

Year
2013
Type(s)
Author(s)
Qazi M., M Titekar, L. Dolecek, D. Shah and A. Chandrakasan
Source
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, Volume 21, No. 8, pp. 1558-1562, 2013
Url
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6298024

This brief presents a technique to evaluate the timing variation of static random access memory (SRAM). Specifically, a method called loop flattening, which reduces the evaluation of the timing statistics in the complex highly structured circuit to that of a single chain of component circuits, is justified. Then, to very quickly evaluate the timing delay of a single chain, a statistical method based on importance sampling augmented with targeted high-dimensional spherical sampling can be employed. The overall methodology has shown 650× or greater speedup over the nominal Monte Carlo approach with 10.5% accuracy in probability. Examples based on both the large-signal and small-signal SRAM read path are discussed, and a detailed comparison with state-of-the-art accelerated statistical simulation techniques is given.