High-Dimensional Uncertainty Quantification of Electronic and Photonic IC With Non-Gaussian Correlated Process Variations

Abstract

Uncertainty quantification based on generalized polynomial chaos has been used in many applications. It has also achieved great success in variation-aware design automation. However, almost all existing techniques assume that the parameters are mutually independent or Gaussian correlated, which is rarely true in real applications. For instance, in chip manufacturing, many process variations are actually correlated. Recently, some techniques have been developed to handle non-Gaussian correlated random parameters, but they are time-consuming for high-dimensional problems. We present a new framework to solve uncertainty quantification problems with many non-Gaussian correlated uncertainties. First, we propose a set of smooth basis functions to well capture the impact of non-Gaussian correlated process variations. We develop a tensor approach to compute these basis functions in a high-dimension setting. Second, we investigate the theoretical aspect and practical implementation of a sparse solver to compute the coefficients of all basis functions. We provide some theoretical analysis for the exact recovery condition and error bound of this sparse solver in the context of uncertainty quantification. We present three adaptive sampling approaches to improve the performance of the sparse solver. Finally, we validate our methods by synthetic and practical electronic/photonic ICs with 19 to 57 non-Gaussian correlated variation parameters. Our approach outperforms Monte Carlo by thousands of times in terms of efficiency. It can also accurately predict the output density functions with multiple peaks caused by non-Gaussian correlations, which are hard to capture by existing methods.