Prototype for a large-scale static timing analyzer running on an IBM Blue Gene

Abstract

This paper focuses on parallelization of the classic static timing analysis (STA) algorithm for verifying timing characteristics of digital integrated circuits. Given ever-increasing circuit complexities, including the need to analyze circuits with billions of transistors, across potentially thousands of process corners, with accuracy tolerances down to the picosecond range, sequential execution of STA algorithms is quickly becoming a bottleneck to the overall chip design closure process. A message passing based parallel processing technique for performing STA leveraging an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputing platform is presented. Results are collected for a small industrial 65 nm benchmarking design, where the algorithm demonstrates speedup of nearly 39 times on 64 processors and a peak of 119 times (without partitioning costs, speedup is 263 times) on 1024 processors. With an idealized synthetic circuit, the algorithm demonstrated 259 times speedup, 925 times speedup without partitioning overhead, on 1024 processors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result demonstrating scalable STA on the IBM Blue Gene.