Method of simulation for gate oxide integrity check on an entire IC

This invention relates to methods for designing and fabricating digital integrated circuits, and in particular to simulation and analysis of the circuit design in order to detect and eliminate excessive electric field stress on gate oxide of the transistors comprising the digital circuits. In deep submicron technologies, coupling capacitance significantly dominates the total parasitic capacitance. This causes crosstalk noise to be induced on quiescent signals which could lead to catastrophic failures of transistor gate oxide. A methodology is provided that is a practical approach to full-chip crosstalk noise verification and gate oxide integrity analysis. A grouping based method is described for identification of potential victims and associated aggressors, using either timing information or functional information. Potential victim signal lines are selected and pruned based on total coupling capacitance to various signal groups. Selected signal lines are then fully simulated to determine gate oxide field strengths on transistors connected to the selected signal lines.