Efficient Multivariate Moment Estimation via Bayesian Model
Fusion for Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits
Qicheng Huang
1
, Chenlei Fang
1
, Fan Yang
1,*
, Xuan Zeng
1,*
and Xin Li
1,2
1
State Key Lab of ASIC & System, Microelectronics Department, Fudan University, Shanghai, P. R. China
2
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ABSTRACT
A critical-yet-challenging problem of analog/mixed-signal circuit
validation in either pre-silicon or post-silicon stage is to estimate
the parametric yield of the performances. In this paper, we
propose a novel Bayesian model fusion method for efficient
multivariate moment estimation of multiple correlated
performance metrics by borrowing the prior knowledge from the
early stage. The key idea is to model the multiple performance
metrics as a jointly Gaussian distribution and encode the prior
knowledge as a normal-Wishart distribution according to the
theory of conjugate prior. The late-stage multivariate moments
can be accurately estimated by Bayesian inference with very few
late-stage samples. Several circuit examples demonstrate that the
proposed method can achieve up to 16× cost reduction over the
traditional method without surrendering any accuracy.
1. INTRODUCTION
The continuous scaling of integrated circuits (ICs) leads to
severe process variations. Process variations, in terms of doping
profiles, interconnect widths, channel lengths, etc., lead to large-
scale variations in the corresponding electrical parameters (e.g.,
resistance, capacitance, threshold voltage, etc.) of CMOS
transistors and metal interconnects. These variations would
consequently impact the parametric yield of analog and mixed-
signal (AMS) circuits. Hence, accurate yield estimation is one of
the critical tasks for both pre-silicon verification and post-silicon
validation of AMS circuits in order to improve the circuit
performance and/or reduce the manufacturing cost at advanced
technology nodes [1-4].
Recently, post-silicon tuning and self-healing techniques have
been proposed to address the yield loss posed by process
variations. These methods adaptively adjust a number of tunable
knobs (e.g., bias current) to meet the performance requirement
after manufacturing [3-4]. They pose great challenges to yield
estimation, as a large number of samples must be collected for a
highly complex, tunable circuit by either circuit simulation (for
pre-silicon verification) or silicon measurement (for post-silicon
validation). Both circuit simulation and silicon measurement are
time-consuming. For example, one single post-layout simulation
of a large-scale AMS circuit such as PLL or SRAM could take
several days to finish. On the other hand, due to the time-to-
market pressure, only a small number of silicon measurements can
be taken at the post-silicon validation stage, especially because the
measurements of a number of AMS performance metrics such as
bit rate error are extremely time-consuming. Hence, it is
impossible to collect a large number of samples for yield
estimation for either pre-silicon verification or post-silicon
validation.
To address this issue, Bayesian Model Fusion (BMF) has been
proposed to accurately estimate the parametric yield and/or the
statistical distribution of circuit performance for both pre-silicon
verification and post-silicon validation [5-8]. The key idea of
BMF is to borrow the knowledge of an early stage (e.g., pre-
layout simulation) to accurately estimate the yield and/or
distribution at the late stage (e.g., post-layout simulation) with
very few late-stage samples. Because the simulation and/or
measurement data from the early and late stages are derived from
the same circuit, they are expected to be highly correlated. By
fusing the early-stage and late-stage data, the parametric yield
and/or performance distribution of the late stage can be accurately
estimated with few samples and, hence, low computational and/or
measurement cost.
The BMF method was previously developed for moment
estimation of AMS circuits where only a single performance
metric is considered [5-8]. However, the parametric yield value of
an AMS circuit is often defined by multiple correlated
performance metrics. Motivated by this observation, we propose a
novel multivariate moment estimation method in this paper.
Particularly, we assume that the probability distribution of
multiple AMS performance metrics is jointly (or, multivariate)
Gaussian and our objective is to accurately estimate its means
vector and covariance matrix.
Towards this goal, we borrow the early-stage data and encode
the prior knowledge as a normal-Wishart distribution according to
the conjugate prior theory from the statistics community [14].
Next, the prior knowledge is combined with very few late-stage
data via Bayesian inference to accurately estimate the mean vector
and covariance matrix for multiple AMS performance metrics. As
will be demonstrated by our experimental results in Section 5, the
proposed method can achieve up to 16× cost reduction over the
traditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method
without surrendering any accuracy.
It is important to note that the probability distribution of AMS
performance metrics may not be accurately modeled as a jointly
Gaussian distribution [9-13]. However, accurately estimating a
non-Gaussian distribution often needs to collect a large number of
samples and, hence, is not feasible with limited data. Since we
focus on the problem of pre-silicon verification and post-silicon
validation with an extremely small data set, we constrain our
discussions to Gaussian distribution in this paper. How to extend
the proposed BMF method to other non-Gaussian distributions
will be further studied in our future researches (e.g., by estimating
and matching the high-order moments).
The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section
* Corresponding authors: {yangfan, xzeng}@fudan.edu.cn.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2744769.2744832