Tatum: A Fast, Flexible Static Timing Analysis (STA) Engine for Digital Circuits

##Overview Tatum is primarily a library (libtatum) which provides a fast and flexible Static Timing Analysis (STA) engine for digital circuits.

Tatum is a block-based timing analyzer suitable for integration with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools used to optimize and implement digital circuits. Tatum supports both setup (max) and hold (min) analysis, clock skew and multiple clocks.

Tatum operates on an abstract timing graph constructed by the host application, can be configured to use an application defined delay calculator.

Tatum is optimized for high performance, as required by optimizing CAD tools. In particular:

• Tatum performs only a single set of graph traversals to calculate timing information for all clocks.
• Tatum's data structures are cache optimized
• Tatum supports parallel analysis using multiple CPU cores

##Why was Tatum created? I had need for a high performance, flexible STA engine for my PhD research into FPGA architecture and CAD tools. I could find no suitable open source STA engines, and wrote my own.

##Origin of the Name A tatum is a unit of time used in the computational analysis of music [1], named after the famous Jazz pianist Art Tatum.