Microelectronic circuit com-prises a plurality of logic units and register circuits, arranged into a plu-rality of processing paths, and a plu-rality of monitoring units associated with respective ones of said processing paths. Each of said monitoring units is configured to produce an observation signal as a response to anomalous opera-tion of the respective processing path. Each of said plurality of logic units belongs to one of a plurality of delay classes according to an amount of delay that it is likely to generate. Said de-lay classes comprise first, second, and third classes, of which the first class covers logic units that are likely to generate longest delays, the second class covers logic units that are likely to generate shorter delays than said first class, and the third class covers logic units that are likely to generate shorter delays than said second class. At least some of said plurality of pro-cessing paths comprise logic units be-longing to said second class but are without monitoring units. At least some of said plurality of processing paths comprise logic units belonging to said third class but have monitoring units associated with them.

Glitch source identification and ranking is provided by: identifying a plurality of glitch sources in a circuit layout; back referencing the plurality of glitch sources to corresponding lines in a Resistor Transistor Logic (RTL) file defining the plurality of glitch sources; identifying, in the circuit layout, a plurality of glitch terminuses associated with the plurality of glitch sources; determining a plurality of glitch power consumption values associated with the plurality of glitch sources based on fanouts in the circuit layout extending from the plurality of glitch sources to the plurality of glitch terminuses; ranking, by a processor, the plurality of glitch sources based on corresponding glitch power consumption values of the plurality of glitch power consumption values corresponding to individual glitch sources of the plurality of glitch sources; and reporting the corresponding lines in the RTL file associated with the ranked plurality of glitch sources.

Disclosed in the present invention is a flexible modeling method for a timing constraint of a register. Simulation ranges of input terminal transition time, clock terminal transition time, and output load capacitance of a register are determined first, simulation is performed under each combination of input terminal transition time, clock terminal transition time, and output load capacitance to obtain a timing constraint range, then setup slack and hold slack are extracted in this constraint range with a particular interval, and then simulation is performed to obtain a clock terminal-to-output terminal delay. Finally, a mutually independent timing model of the register is established by using an artificial neural network, where the clock terminal-to-output terminal delay is modeled as a function of the input terminal transition time, the clock terminal transition time, the output load capacitance, the setup slack, the hold slack, and an output terminal state. A flexible timing constraint model in the present invention has advantages of low simulation overheads and high prediction precision, and is of great significance for static timing analysis timing signoff of a digital integrated circuit.

A chip design method, a chip design device, a chip, and an electronic device are provided. The chip design method includes: determining at least one power state of the chip, one power state of the at least one power state including switch states of respective power domains on the chip in a chip operation mode, and the at least one power state including a first power state; determining control signals sent by changed power domains in the respective power domains in a case where a power state of the chip is switched to the first power state, in a case where the power state of the chip is switched to the first power state, switch states of the changed power domains changing; and analyzing timing dependency between the control signals to determine timing dependency between power domains to which the control signals act in the first power state.

A computer device for characterising execution time by a processor, comprising a memory (8) which receives benchmark program data, sets of characterisation configuration data and sets of execution case data, and a constructor (4) which determines, for each set of execution case data, a set of worst-case configuration data of the processor and a set of initialisation values based on a set of execution case data, and determining a reference execution time by executing the benchmark program according to the set of execution case data using the processor configured with the set of configuration data with the set of initialisation values, all the reference execution times forming a set of reference execution times. The constructor (4) determines, for each set of characterisation configuration data, a set of characterisation execution times comprising a number of characterisation execution times equal to the number of elements of the set of reference execution times and each characterisation execution time being determined by executing the benchmark program using the processor configured with a set of characterisation configuration data and with a set of initialisation values representing the benchmark program and the processor. The constructor (4) determines a set of characterisation coefficients by applying an algorithm for determining the maximum likelihood between the set of reference execution times (M0) and the sets of characterisation execution times (M[k]), and the device returns the set of characterisation configuration data and the set of characterisation coefficients.

A method of constructing a hierarchical clock tree for an integrated circuit may include constructing a clock distribution network on a first level, pushing the clock distribution network to a second level, implementing partition clock trees in partitions on the second level, and calculating combined timing of the clock distribution network and the partition clock trees on the second level. Implementing the partition clock trees may include constructing the partition dock trees in the partitions on the second level, calculating trial timing for the partition clock trees, calculating target timing constraints for the partition clock trees based on timing of the dock distribution network and the trial timing for the partition dock trees, and adjusting the timing of one or more of the partition clock trees based on the target constraints.

An integrated circuit layout is provided. The integrated circuit layout includes one or more first cell rows partially extending across a space arranged for an integrated circuit layout along a first direction. Each of the one or more first cell rows has a first height along a second direction perpendicular to the first direction. The integrated circuit layout includes one or more third cell rows partially extending across the space along the first direction. Each of the one or more third cell rows has a second height along the second direction, the second height different from the first height.

Disclosed in the present invention is a method for predicting a delay at multiple corners for a digital integrated circuit, which is applicable to the problem of timing signoff at multiple corners. In the aspect of feature engineering, a path delay relationship at adjacent corners is extracted by using a dilated convolutional neural network (Dilated CNN), and learning is performed by using a bi-directional long short-term memory model (Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory, BLSTM) to obtain topology information of a path. Finally, prediction results of a path delay at a plurality of corners are obtained by using an output of a multi-gate mixture-of-experts network model (Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts, MMoE). Compared with a conventional machine learning method, the present invention can achieve prediction with higher precision through more effective feature engineering processing in a case of low simulation overheads, and is of great significance for timing signoff at multiple corners of a digital integrated circuit.

Disclosed in the present invention is a method for optimizing circuit timing based on a flexible register timing library. First, registers are simulated respectively in a case of a plurality of groups of an input signal conversion time, a clock signal conversion time, and a register load capacitance, corresponding actual propagation delays at this time are obtained by changing setup slack and hold slack of the registers, and actual propagation delays of the registers under specific input signal conversion time, clock signal conversion time, register load capacitances, setup slack, and hold slack are obtained through linear interpolation, to establish a flexible register timing library; and then static timing analysis is performed on all register paths in a circuit by using the library, a minimum clock cycle under a condition of satisfying that a setup time margin and a hold time margin are both greater than zero is found by changing the setup slack and hold slack of the registers, thereby improving the performance of the circuit without changing the design of the circuit and without increasing the area overheads of the circuit.

A computer-readable storage medium that stores computer program code which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to execute tools for designing an integrated circuit (IC). The tools include a placing and routing tool that generates layout data and wire data corresponding to a net included in the IC by placing and routing standard cells defining the IC, the wire data including physical information of a wire implementing the net, and a timing analysis tool that calculates a wire delay with respect to the wire corresponding to the net, based on the physical information, updates the wire delay based on process variation of the wire, and calculates a timing slack by using the updated wire delay.