| # Tatum: A Fast, Flexible Static Timing Analysis (STA) Engine for Digital Circuits |
| |
| [](https://travis-ci.org/kmurray/tatum) |
| |
| ## Overview |
| Tatum is a block-based Static Timing Analysis (STA) engine suitable for integration with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, which analyze, implement and optimize digital circuits. |
| Tatum supports both setup (max-delay) and hold (min-delay) analysis, clock skew, multiple clocks and a variety of timing exceptions. |
| |
| Tatum is provided as a library (`libtatum`) which can be easily integrated into the host application. |
| Tatum operates on an abstract *timing graph* constructed by the host application, and 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 and analyses (setup and hold). |
| * Tatum's data structures are cache optimized |
| * Tatum supports parallel analysis using multiple CPU cores |
| |
| ## How to Cite |
| If your work uses Tatum please cite the following as a general citation: |
| |
| K. E. Murray and V. Betz, "Tatum: Parallel Timing Analysis for Faster Design Cycles and Improved Optimization", *IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT)*, 2018 |
| |
| **Bibtex:** |
| ``` |
| @inproceedings{c:tatum, |
| author = {Murray, Kevin E. and Betz, Vaughn}, |
| title = {Tatum: Parallel Timing Analysis for Faster Design Cycles and Improved Optimization}, |
| booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT)}, |
| year = {2018} |
| } |
| ``` |
| |
| ## Documentation |
| Comming soon. |
| |
| ## Download |
| Comming soon. |
| |
| ## Projects using Tatum |
| |
| Tatum is designed to be re-usable in a variety of appliations. |
| |
| Some of the known uses are: |
| * The [Verilog to Routing (VTR)](https://verilogtorouting.org) project for Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Architecture and CAD research. Tatum is used as the STA engine in the VPR placement and routing tool. |
| * The [CGRA-ME](http://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/) framework for Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) Architecture research. |
| |
| *If your project is using Tatum please let us know!* |
| |
| ## History |
| |
| ### Why was Tatum created? |
| I had need for a high performance, flexible STA engine for my research into FPGA architecture and CAD tools. |
| I could find no suitable open source STA engines, and wrote my own. |
| |
| ### Name Origin |
| A *tatum* is a unit of time used in the computational analysis of music \[[1]\], named after Jazz pianist [Art Tatum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tatum). |
| |
| [1]: http://web.media.mit.edu/~tristan/phd/dissertation/chapter3.html#x1-390003.4.3 |
