Chapter 7
Conclusion
We proposed a fast and inexpensive method for the gate-level variations estima-
tion in the power and the delay frameworks. In the power framework, the total
power consumption is measured for a number of input vectors to the IC. Because
of the variations, the power consumption of the gates in the circuit will be scaled.
Using the leakage model of variations, we construct a linear equation for each
power measurement with the scaling factors of the gates as the unknown vari-
ables. In the delay framework, the linear equations are constructed by measuring
delays of a sensitizable basis path set. Here, unknown variables are the variations
in the gate sizing that have a linear relationship with the delay.
Next, we estimate the gate-level variations (power or delay) by solving the ap-
propriate system of linear equations. We can use the traditional -^-minimization
to estimate the gate level variations. Since there are not enough linearly inde-
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