Post-Silicon Tunable (PST) buffers are widely adopted in high-performance integrated circuits to fix timing violations introduced by process variations. In typical optimization procedures, the statistical timing analysis of the circuits with PST clock buffers will be executed more than 2000 times for large scale circuits. Therefore, the efficiency of the statistical timing analysis is crucial to the PST clock buffer optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collocation based efficient statistical timing analysis method for circuits with PST buffers. In the proposed method, we employ the Howard algorithm to calculate the clock periods of the circuits on less than 100 deterministic sparse-grid collocation points. Afterwards, we use these obtained clock periods to derive the yield of the circuits according to the stochastic collocation theory. Compared with the state-of-the-art statistical timing analysis method for the circuits with PST clock buffers, the proposed method achieves up to 22X speedup with comparable accuracy.

In this paper, a spectral domain method named the SDF (Spectral Density Fitting) method for intra-die spatial correlation function extraction is presented. Based on theoretical analysis of random field, the spectral density, as the spectral domain counterpart of correlation function, is employed to estimate the parameters of the correlation function effectively in the spectral domain. Compared with the existing extraction algorithm in the original spatial domain, the SDF method can obtain the same quality of results in the spectral domain. In actual measurement process, the unavoidable measurement error with arbitrary frequency components would greatly confound the extraction results. A filtering technique is further developed to diminish the high frequency components of the measurement error and recover the data from noise contamination for parameter estimation. Experimental results have shown that the SDF method is practical and stable.

For variation-aware capacitance extraction, stochastic collocation method (SCM) based on Homogeneous Chaos expansion has the exponential convergence rate for Gaussian geometric variations, and is considered as the optimal solution using a quadratic model to model the parasitic capacitances. However, when geometric variations are measured from the real test chip, they are not necessarily Gaussian, which will significantly compromise the exponential convergence property of SCM. In order to pursue the exponential convergence, in this paper, a generalized stochastic collocation method (gSCM) based on generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) expansion and generalized Sparse Grid quadrature is proposed for variation-aware capacitance extraction that further considers the arbitrary random probability of real geometric variations. Additionally, a recycling technique based on Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) structure is proposed to reduce the computation cost at each collocation point, for not only "recycling" the initial value, but also "recycling" the preconditioning matrix. The exponential convergence of the proposed gSCM is clearly shown in the numerical results for the geometric variations with arbitrary random probability.

In this paper, a novel intra-die spatial correlation extraction method referred to as MLEMTC (Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Multiple Test Chips) is presented. In the MLEMTC method, a joint likelihood function is formulated by multiplying the set of individual likelihood functions for all test chips. This joint likelihood function is then maximized to extract a unique group of parameter values of a single spatial correlation function, which can be used for statistical circuit analysis and design. Moreover, to deal with the purely random component and measurement error contained in measurement data, the spatial correlation function combined with the correlation of white noise is used in the extraction, which significantly improves the accuracy of the extraction results. Furthermore, an LU decomposition based technique is developed to calculate the log-determinant of the positive definite matrix within the likelihood function, which solves the numerical stability problem encountered in the direct calculation. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method is efficient and practical.

In this paper, a Stochastic Collocation Algorithm combined with Sparse Grid technique (SSCA) is proposed to deal with the periodic steady-state analysis for nonlinear systems with process variations. Compared to the existing approaches, SSCA has several considerable merits. Firstly, compared with the moment-matching parameterized model order reduction (PMOR) which equally treats the circuit response on process variables and frequency parameter by Taylor approximation, SSCA employs Homogeneous Chaos to capture the impact of process variations with exponential convergence rate and adopts Fourier series or Wavelet Bases to model the steady-state behavior in time domain. Secondly, contrary to Stochastic Galerkin Algorithm (SGA), which is efficient for stochastic linear system analysis, the complexity of SSCA is much smaller than that of SGA for nonlinear case. Thirdly, different from Efficient Collocation Method, the heuristic approach which may result in "Rank deficient problem" and "Runge phenomenon," Sparse Grid technique is developed to select the collocation points needed in SSCA in order to reduce the complexity while guaranteing the approximation accuracy. Furthermore, though SSCA is proposed for the stochastic nonlinear steady-state analysis, it can be applied to any other kind of nonlinear system simulation with process variations, such as transient analysis, etc.

In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Stochastic Collocation Method for block-based Statistical Static Timing Analysis (SSTA). A novel adaptive method is proposed to perform SSTA with delays of gates and interconnects modeled by quadratic polynomials based on Homogeneous Chaos expansion. In order to approximate the key atomic operator MAX in the full random space during timing analysis, the proposed method adaptively chooses the optimal algorithm from a set of stochastic collocation methods by considering different input conditions. Compared with the existing stochastic collocation methods, including the one using dimension reduction technique and the one using Sparse Grid technique, the proposed method has 10x improvements in the accuracy while using the same order of computation time. The proposed algorithm also shows great improvement in accuracy compared with a moment matching method. Compared with the 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations on ISCAS85 benchmark circuits, the results of the proposed method show less than 1% error in the mean and variance, and nearly 100x speeds up.

In this paper, we propose a Modified nested sparse grid based Adaptive Stochastic Collocation Method (MASCM) for block-based Statistical Static Timing Analysis (SSTA). The proposed MASCM employs an improved adaptive strategy derived from the existing Adaptive Stochastic Collocation Method (ASCM) to approximate the key operator MAX during timing analysis. In contrast to ASCM which uses non-nested sparse grid and tensor product quadratures to approximate the MAX operator for weakly and strongly nonlinear conditions respectively, MASCM proposes a modified nested sparse grid quadrature to approximate the MAX operator for both weakly and strongly nonlinear conditions. In the modified nested sparse grid quadrature, we firstly construct the second order quadrature points based on extended Gauss-Hermite quadrature and nested sparse grid technique, and then discard those quadrature points that do not contribute significantly to the computation accuracy to enhance the efficiency of the MAX approximation. Compared with the non-nested sparse grid quadrature, the proposed modified nested sparse grid quadrature not only employs much fewer collocation points, but also offers much higher accuracy. Compared with the tensor product quadrature, the modified nested sparse grid quadrature greatly reduced the computational cost, while still maintains sufficient accuracy for the MAX operator approximation. As a result, the proposed MASCM provides comparable accuracy while remarkably reduces the computational cost compared with ASCM. The numerical results show that with comparable accuracy MASCM has 50% reduction in run time compared with ASCM.

In this paper, a Stochastic Non-Homogeneous ARnoldi (SNHAR) method is proposed for the analysis of the on-chip power grid networks in the presence of process variations. In SNHAR method, the polynomial chaos based stochastic method is employed to handle the variations of power grids. Different from the existing StoEKS method which uses extended Krylov Subspace (EKS) method to compute the coefficients of the polynomial chaos, a computation-efficient and numerically stable Non-Homogeneous ARnoldi (NHAR) method is employed in SNHAR method to compute the coefficients of the polynomial chaos. Compared with EKS method, NHAR method has superior numerical stability and can achieve remarkably higher accuracy with even lower computational cost. As a result, SNHAR can capture the stochastic characteristics of the on-chip power grid networks with higher accuracy, but even lower computational cost than StoEKS.

Yield-driven clock skew scheduling was previously formulated as a minimum cost-to-time ratio cycle problem, by assuming that variational path delays are in Gaussian distributions. However in today's nanometer technology, process variations show growing impacts on this assumption, as variational delays with non-Gaussian distributions have been observed on these paths. In this paper, we propose a novel yield-driven clock skew scheduling method for arbitrary distributions of critical path delays. Firstly, a general problem formulation is proposed. By integrating the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of critical path delays, the formulation is able to handle path delays with any distributions. It also generalizes the previous formulations on yield-driven clock skew scheduling and indicates their statistical interpretations. Generalized Howard algorithm is derived for finding the critical cycles of the underlying timing constraint graphs. Moreover, an effective algorithm based on minimum balancing is proposed for the overall yield improvement. Experimental results on ISCAS89 benchmarks show that, compared with two representative existing methods, our method remarkably improves the yield by 10.25% on average (up to 14.66%).