Structural Monitors

Silicon Performance Variation Visibility from Design to In-Field

Structural monitors are a significant step in the evolution of embedded monitoring. By distributing structural monitors throughout your advanced node design, data associated with the operational margin of your silicon can be gathered and assessed. The ability to enable enhanced performance optimization and to enable better assessment of silicon aging and degradation are the two key benefits to the inclusion of structural monitors. Data from structural monitors can be assessed at any stage of the silicon lifecycle and will form the basis to highly enriched analytics for not only production test but also in-field operation. Smart VFS (voltage frequency scaling), power supply margin and timing margin optimization are some of the concepts which can be enabled by structural monitors. Structural monitors from Synopsys include path margin monitoring technologies.