Comparison of modeling techniques in circuit variability analysis

Abstract

SUMMARY Three nonlinear reduced‐order modeling approaches are compared in a case study of circuit variability analysis for deep submicron complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor technologies where variability of the electrical characteristics of a transistor can be significantly detrimental to circuit performance. The drain currents of 65 nm N‐type metal‐oxide‐semiconductor and P‐type metal‐oxide‐semiconductor transistors are modeled in terms of a few process parameters, terminal voltages, and temperature using Kriging‐based surrogate models, neural network‐based models, and support vector machine‐based models. The models are analyzed with respect to their accuracy, establishment time, size, and evaluation time. It is shown that Kriging‐based surrogate models and neural network‐based models can be generated with sufficient accuracy that they can be used in circuit variability analysis. Numerical experiments demonstrate that for smaller circuits, Kriging‐based surrogate modeling yields results faster than the neural network‐based models for the same accuracy whereas for larger circuits, neural network‐based models are preferred as, in all metrics, better performance is obtained. Within‐die variations for an XOR circuit are analyzed, and it is shown that the nonlinear reduced‐order models developed can more effectively capture the within‐die variations than the traditional process corner analysis. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Microwave neural modeling for silicon FinFET varactors

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