Efficient timing verification of latch-synchronized systems

Abstract

This paper presents an event-driven approach to the timing verification of latch-synchronized systems. The proposed method performs critical path extraction and timing error detection at the same time, and extracts the critical path only if necessary By doing so, the complexity of analysis is reduced and efficiency is greatly improved over the conventional approaches which detect timing errors after extracting the complete critical paths of the system. Experimental results show that, compared to the existing methods, it provides a more than 12-fold improvement in speed on the average for ISCAS benchmark circuits, and the relative efficiency of analysis improves as the circuit size grows.