High level analysis of false paths

Sometimes the delay through a component is dependent upon the values on signals. This is because different paths in the circuit have different delays and some input values will prevent some paths from being exercised. Here are two simple examples:

1. In a ripple-carry adder, if a carry out of the MSB is generated from the least significant bit, then it will take longer for the output to stabilize than if no carries generated at all.
2. In a state machine using a one-hot state encoding, false paths might exist when more than one state bit is a '1'.
   

Because of these effects, static timing analysis might be overly conservative and predict a delay that is greater than you will experience in practice. The most accurate delay analysis requires looking at the actual data values that will occur in practice. Conversely, a timing simulation may not demonstrate the actual slowest behaviour of your circuit: if you don't ever generate a carry from LSB to MSB, then you'll never exercise the critical path in your adder.