Confidence scalable post-silicon statistical delay prediction under process variations

Due to increased variability trends in nanoscale integrated circuits, statistical circuit analysis has become essential. We present a novel method for post-silicon analysis that gathers data from a small number of on-chip test structures, and combines this information with pre-silicon statistical timing analysis to obtain narrow, die-specific, timing PDFs. Experimental results show that for the benchmark suite being considered, taking all parameter variations into consideration, our approach can get a PDF with the standard deviation 83.5% smaller on average than the SSTA result. The approach is scalable to smaller test structure overheads.