On fast timing closure: Speeding up incremental path-based timing analysis with MapReduce

Incremental path-based timing analysis (PBA) is a pivotal step in the timing optimization flow. A core building block analyzes the timing path-by-path subject to a critical amount of incremental changes on the design. However, this process in nature demands an extremely high computational complexity and has been a major bottleneck in accelerating timing closure. Therefore, we introduce in this paper a fast and scalable algorithm of incremental PBA with MapReduce – a recently popular programming paradigm in big-data era. Inspired by the spirit of MapReduce, we formulate our problem into tasks that are associated with keys and values and perform massively-parallel map and reduce operations on a distributed system. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach can not only easily analyze huge deisgns in a few minutes, but also quickly revalidate the timing after the incremental changes. Our results are beneficial for speeding up the lengthy design cycle of timing closure.