Distributed Timing Analysis at Scale

Abstract

As the design complexities continue to grow, the need to efficiently analyze circuit timing with billions of transistors is quickly becoming the major bottleneck to the overall chip design flow. In this work we introduce a distributed timer that (1) has scalable performance, (2) can be seamless integrable to existing EDA applications, (3) enables transparent resource management, (4) has robust faulttolerant control. We evaluate the distributed timer using a set of large industry benchmarks on a cluster with 24 nodes. The results show that the proposed timer achieves full accuracy over all designs with high performance and good scalability.