Test Your EQ (Engineering Quotient) - EQ#35

For the purpose of timing analysis, the operating conditions of an FPGA are sometimes known as “PVT,” which stands for “process, voltage, and temperature.” Voltage and temperature are pretty much self-explanatory, but what does process mean in this context?

The term process in this case refers to the manufacturing process at the plant where they make the FPGA. It’s a measure of the statistical variability of the physical characteristics from chip to chip as they come off the line.

This includes everything from mask alignment to etching times to doping levels. These things affect electrical parameters such as sheet and contact resistance, actual transistor gains, and thresholds and parasitic capacitances.

These kinds of variations are unavoidable, and the P in PVT is an attempt to account for their effects in the timing analysis. The idea is to make the analysis conservative enough so that your design will work reliably despite these variations.

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