Statistical timing analysis for latch-controlled circuits with reduced iterations and graph transformations

Level-sensitive latches are widely used in high-performance designs. For such circuits, efficient statistical timing analysis algorithms are needed to take increasing process variations into account. The existing methods for solving this problem are still computationally expensive and can only provide the yield at a given clock period. In this paper, we propose a method combining reduced iterations and graph transformations. The reduced iterations extract setup time constraints and identify a subgraph for the following graph transformations handling the constraints from nonpositive loops. The combined algorithms are very efficient, more than ten times faster than other existing methods, and result in a parametric minimum clock period, which, together with the hold-time constraints, can be used to compute the yield at any given clock period very easily.