Statistical design with importance sampling reuse

Abstract

A mechanism is provided for reusing importance sampling for efficient cell failure rate estimation of process variations and other design considerations. First, the mechanism performs a search across circuit parameters to determine failures with respect to a set of performance variables. For a single failure region, the initial search may be a uniform sampling of the parameter space. Mixture importance sampling (MIS) efficiently may estimate the single failure region. The mechanism then finds a center of gravity for each metric and finds importance samples. Then, for each new origin corresponding to a process variation or other design consideration, the mechanism finds a suitable projection and recomputes new importance sampling (IS) ratios.