Statistical static timing analysis considering leakage variability in power gated designs

This paper is the first to study the impact of fluctuations in virtual power supply rail (vv _dd) of power-gated designs on the circuit timing, where the vvdd fluctuations are due to process-induced leakage variability. We present a Monte Carlo-based statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) framework which accurately accounts for process-induced leakage variability and its impact on vvdd fluctuations and timing. For vvdd computation we propose an efficient and fast converging iterative analysis, which we explore to result in minimal additional complexity to traditional SSTA where leakage variability is not considered during analysis. We provide separate discussions for the two cases of SSTA for power-gated ASICs and microprocessors; in the latter we also consider process-induced dynamic power variability. In our simulations, we show significant error in traditional SSTA. We also study the impact of number of power-gated clusters on leakage variability, vvdd fluctuations and timing variations. We show that increase in the number of power-gated clusters reduces the circuit timing variance.