Interval-value based circuit simulation for statistical circuit design

An interval-value based circuit simulation engine is proposed to estimate the transistor-level circuit performance distribution without Monte-Carlo simulations. In the proposed flow, variability in process variables is first casted into an interval representation; then an interval-valued circuit simulator, in which all real number operations are replaced by interval operations, is used to simulate the circuit; the interval-valued simulation results can be used to extract performance statistics. A runtime reduction over both Monte-Carlo simulation and response surface modeling has been demonstrated, while excellent accuracies in transistor-level performance statistics are maintained. Future work includes incorporating non-Gaussian distributions into the interval simulation, and adapting an interval-value based framework into a design flow suitable for statistical performance optimization.