What is meant by a critical path in a circuit level design?

hi all

what is meant by a critical path in a circuit level design.
Note:This is related to functional verification

thx for your time

Re: critical path

hi,

here is my understanding

In gate level it is path which determines the max. ckt operating freq

in transistor level it can be the path which carries max. current, R or C (based on wht u luking for)

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

Re: critical path

Did not get my point

have a look

It will be directed towards the development of automatic verification and autmoatic result checkers. The team members will be required to devise the testbenches and blocks used to verify the functionality of the circuits designed, starting from simple block level up to complex mixed-signal systems, not only analog or digital circuits.
Such task requires excellent knowledge of circuit level design, the ability to pin point the critical paths and test conditions and the ability to combine correctly interpret the output of these blocks/systems to debug and judge their behavior. This means they need to have a very good circuits as well as system-level back ground, both analog and digital, to be able to deal with mixed-signal circuits. The team members will also need to learn various modeling skills to help them automate this process and make it effort-efficient for complex systems.
If you want my words, this is a challenging project, as people will tend to learn and design all the way in parallel. Although its not a design-oriented project, but the knowledge they'll learn in this project will make them very strong in the fields of modelling and mixed-signal circuits. They'll have a very strong background later if they want to shift to circuit design.