Post-silicon timing characterization by compressed sensing

We address post-silicon characterization of the unique gate delays and their timing distributions on each manufactured IC. Our proposed approach is based upon the new theory of compressed sensing. The first step in performing timing measurements is to find the sensitizable paths by traditional testing methods. Next, we show that the timing variations are sparse in the wavelet domain. The sparsity is exploited for estimation of the gate delays using the compressed sensing theory. This estimation method requires significantly less number of timing measurements compared to the case where the dependence between the gate delays is not directly integrated within the estimation framework. We discuss a number of applications for the new post-silicon timing characterization method. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show that using compressed sensing theory can characterize the post-silicon variations with a mean accurately of 95% in the pertinent sparse basis.

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