In-situ timing monitoring methods for variation-resilient designs

With technology scaling, process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations pose great challenges on integrated circuit designs. Conventionally, LSI circuits are designed by adding pessimistic timing margin to guarantee 'always correct' operations even under worst-case conditions. However, due to the increasing PVT variations, unacceptable larger design guard band should be reserved to avoid timing errors on critical paths of circuits, which will therefore lead to very inefficient designs in terms of power and performance. For this reason, in-situ timing monitoring technique has gained great research interest. In this paper, we will review existing variation-resilient design techniques with particular emphasis on in-situ timing monitoring techniques including both detection and prediction-based methods. The effectiveness of in-situ timing monitoring techniques will be discussed. Finally, we show an example of in-situ timing monitoring technique called STEP with applications to general pipeline designs.