Simulating Improbable Events

Suwen Yang and Mark R. Greenstreet
44th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC'2007)

Circuits such as flip-flops, sense amplifiers and synchronizers can exhibit metastability failures that are undetectable given the numerical accuracy limitations of simulators such as HSPICE. We present a novel simulation technique that allows us to generate accurate waveforms for the metastability failures and similar events. We apply our method to two latches and a self-resetting circuit for clock-phase generation.