SBOCV Table Generation

Amber Path FX uses its Fast SPICE based Path Timing for high accuracy SBOCV Table Generation. With its breakthrough variance solver, Amber Path FX generates SBOCV Tables in a fraction of the time required by traditional Monte Carlo SPICE simulation approaches. These SBOCV Tables can be used with any static timing analysis tool that has been validated for SBOCV as part of TSMC’s Reference Flow 11.0.

Benefits of SBOCV

Stage Based OCV (SBOCV) helps with timing closure by reducing the pessimism inherent to corner based timing approaches. SBOCV is an enhanced version of on chip variation (OCV) de-rating for static timing analysis. OCV reduces the pessimism by using SPICE derived tables to better model manufacturing variation. SBOCV enhances OCV by including the depth of the logic in both the clock and data path. The depth of the logic, or stages, helps to take into account local on-die variation uniquely from global die to die variation

Benefits of Amber Path FX for SBOCV Table Generation

Amber Path FX can generate SBOCV tables for any STA tool that support SBOCV in a fraction of the time required by SPICE or Fast SPICE with no loss in accuracy. For example, Amber Path FX generated tables for 4 corners in 10 minutes. This required cell characterization of 2.8 hours, and delivered tables that works with STA tools including PrimeTime™, ETS, Amber™ (note:  format translation required for ETS). By way of comparison, the traditional Monte Carlo SPICE approach takes 3 weeks using 120 commercial SPICE licenses.

SBOCV Whitepaper (pdf)