Predicting Analog Circuit Performance Based on Importance of Uncertainties

Abstract

With the scaling down of CMOS devices, process variation is becoming the leading cause of CMOS based analog circuit failures. For example, a mere 5% variation in feature size can trigger circuit failure. Various methods such as Monte-Carlo and corner-based verification help predict variation caused problems at the expense of thousands of simulations before capturing the problem. This paper presents a new methodology for analog circuit performance prediction. The new method first applies statistical uncertainty analysis on all associated devices in the circuit. By evaluating the uncertainty importance of parameter variability, it approximates the circuit with only components that are most critical to output results. Applying Chebyshev Affine Arithmetic (CAA) on the resulting system provides both performance bounds and probability information in time domain and frequency domain.