An aspect includes forming a layout effect characterization circuit by incorporating a plurality of inverting device chains including a reference chain and one or more chains having a different inverting device arrangement and a same number of inverting devices per chain in an integrated circuit layout. A low pass filter is coupled to an output of the inverting device chains to produce a filtered output. An output capture circuit is coupled to the filtered output to enable a comparison of a captured filtered output of the one or more chains having the different inverting device arrangement to a captured filtered output of the reference chain.