Statistical analysis techniques for logic and memory circuits.

Loading...

View/Download File

Liu_umn_0130E_11328.pdf (5.54 MB)

Persistent link to this item

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/95019

Statistics

View Statistics

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Title

Statistical analysis techniques for logic and memory circuits.

Authors

Liu, Qunzeng

Published Date

2010-07

Publisher

Type

Thesis or Dissertation

Abstract

Process variations have become increasingly important as feature sizes enter the sub- 100nm regime and continue to shrink. Both logic and memory circuits have seen their performance impacted due to these variations. It is increasingly difficult to ensure that the circuit manufactured is in accordance with the expectation of designers through sim- ulation. For logic circuits, general statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) techniques have emerged to calculate the probability density function (PDF) of the circuit delay. However, in many situations post-silicon tuning is needed to further improve the yield. For memory circuits, embedded DRAM (eDRAM) is beginning to replace SRAM as the on-die cache choice in order to keep the scaling trend. Although techniques exist for statistical analysis of SRAM, detailed analysis of eDRAM has not been developed prior to this thesis. In this thesis, we provide techniques to aid statistical analysis for both logic and memory circuits. Our contribution in the logic circuits area is to provide robust and reliable, yet efficient post-silicon statistical delay prediction techniques for estimating the circuit delay, to replace the traditional critical path replica method that can generate large errors due to process variations during the manufacturing process. We solve this problem from both the analysis perspective and the synthesis perspective. For the analysis problem, we assume that we are given a set of test structures built on chip, and try to get the delay information of the original circuit through measurement of these test structures. For the synthesis problem, we automatically build a representative critical path which maximally correlate with the original circuit delay. Both of these approaches are derived using variation aware formula and use SSTA as sub-steps. They capture the delay variation of the original circuit better than the traditional critical path replica approach and eliminates the need to perform full chip testing for the post-silicon tuning purpose. In response to the growing interest in using eDRAM-based memories as on-die cache, in the memory analysis area we provide the first statistical analysis approach for the cell voltage of eDRAM. We not only calculate the main body of the PDF for the cell voltage, but also specifically look at the tail of this PDF which is more important to ensure quality design due to the highly repetitive nature of the memory systems. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our methods by comparing them with Monte Carlo simulations.

Keywords

Embedded DRAM

Post-silicon optimization

SSTA

Statistical analysis

Electrical Engineering

Description

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2010. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: Sachin Suresh Sapatnekar. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 114 pages.

Related to

Replaces

License

Collections

Dissertations

Series/Report Number

Funding information

Isbn identifier

Doi identifier

Previously Published Citation

Suggested citation

Liu, Qunzeng. (2010). Statistical analysis techniques for logic and memory circuits.. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/95019.

Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.