Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Timing Analysis Tools

Nora:	Is there any shorter way than simulation to get the timing right?
Luigi:	Yes, there are two kinds of timing analyzer tools—dynamic and static timing analyzers.

Dynamic Timing Analysis

The simulator can use known or estimated values for the wire and gate delays. It calculates the event-to-event times while the simulation runs. This is dynamic timing analysis (DTA). It can reveal potential timing errors. A timing error example is data arriving late at a register, after the clock signal.

Static Timing Analysis

In addition to simulation, there are static timing analysis (STA) tools. These move a value through the logic and uncover timing errors without using test vectors. These analyzers run much faster than simulators. ...