The Involution Tool for Accurate Digital Timing and Power Analysis

Gain and Pain of a Reliable Delay Model

“…Main contributions: In this paper we are thus extending the evaluation of the IDM to additional place & routed circuits: For an OR Loop, an SR Latch and a ripple-carry Adder (i) analog and digital simulations are run, (ii) the achieved results are evaluated and finally (iii) the introduced overhead is determined. Our analyses (1) confirm the simple applicability of the IDM stated in [4], (2) show a high correlation between IDM and analog simulation results and (3) reveal major shortcomings of the approaches that are currently in use. The realistic behavioral description, however, also leads to a significant overhead in the simulation time of up to 250%.…”

“…For example the quick increase on S 4 in relation to S 3 is not well depicted. Possible causes are inaccurate delay values extracted from the design (as reported in [4]) or the still nonoptimal description of multi-input gates. Nonetheless, due to its accurate pulse width degradation coverage, the IDM is able to provide overall realistic results.…”

“…Although several approaches are currently available (see Section II), Függer et al [3] revealed, that solely the Involution Delay Model (IDM) is able to predict the behavior of a circuit solving the short pulse filtration problem. Recently Öhlinger et al [4] practically applied the IDM to basic circuits, however, primarily to evaluate the accuracy of their introduced simulation framework. Consequently little is known about the behavioral coverage and performance of the IDM in realistic setups.…”

“…Albeit there is a distinguished simulation tool for DDM [11] available, it is shipped as a separate executable, making it demanding to integrate the simulation into an existing design flow. To circumvent this problem for the IDM, Öhlinger et al [4] developed the InvTool, whose VHDL procedures simply have to be linked and thus enforce no changes on the established work flow.…”

Proceedings of the 2021 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI

“…Függer et al [5] thus introduced the Involution Delay Model (IDM), with the distinguishing property that the delay functions for rising ( ↑ ) and falling ( ↓ ) transitions form an involution, i.e., − ↑ (− ↓ ( )) = , which enables faithful short pulse propagation. The Involution Tool [15], a simulation framework utilizing a digital simulation suite, has been used to confirm the models accuracy.…”