This presentation provides a historical perspective of the advances in statistical design methodologies for microwave design tools. We focus on some of the early efforts by John Bandler to turn his research advances into practical results. We describe the formulation of the yield optimization problem, in particular the powerful one-sided ℓ 1 objective function. We discuss modeling requirements to properly account for statistical variations in IC manufacturing. We also describe applications of yield sensitivities and design of experiments (DOE) as well as a recent technique for fast CMOS mismatch analysis.Index Terms -Design methodology, design for manufacture, design optimization, microwave theory and techniques, Monte Carlo methods, statistical analysis, yield estimation, CADCAM.