Under modern VLSI technology, process variations greatly affect circuit performance, especially clock skew which is very timing sensitive. Unwanted skew due to process variation forms a bottleneck preventing further improvement on clock frequency. Impact from intra-chip interconnect variation is becoming remarkable and is difficult to be modeled efficiently due to its distributive nature. Through wire shaping analysis, we establish an analytical bound for the unwanted skew due to wire width variation which is the dominating factor among interconnect variations. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show that this bound is safer, tighter and computationally faster than similar existing approach.

Under modern VLSI technology, process variations greatly affect circuit performance, especially clock skew which is very timing sensitive. Unwanted skew due to process variation forms a bottleneck preventing further improvement on clock frequency. Impact from intra-chip interconnect variation is becoming remarkable and is difficult to be modeled efficiently due to its distributive nature. Through wire shaping analysis, we establish an analytical bound for the unwanted skew due to wire width variation which is the dominating factor among interconnect variations. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show that this bound is safer, tighter and computationally faster than similar existing approach.