ECE PhD candidate, Savithri Sundareswaran, Professor Jacob Abraham, Alexandre Ardelea, and Rajendran Panda won one of three best paper awards given at the 9th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED 2008). The paper, Characterization of Standard Cells for Intra-Cell Mismatch Variations, discusses a new approach to predicting delay variations of gates/cells. Instead of categorizing each device fluctuation separately, the team analyzed the fluctuations in switching and non-switching devices and their impact on delay variations. Using these properties of the devices, they proposed a clustering approach to characterize for cell's delay variations due to intra-cell mismatch variations. The proposed approach results in as much as 12X runtime improvements with acceptable accuracy.

ISQED is a leading electronic design conference focused on innovations dealing with process variations and design margin exploration.