Optimal inflation technique in gradient estimation of parametric yield of electronic circuits

In this paper, the theoretical bases of the inflation technique in parametric yield gradient estimation are developed and the optimal inflation factor is obtained. The inflation technique simply consists of inflating the tolerance region of circuit parameters by a given factor. The quality of parametric yield optimization algorithms depends on the effectiveness of estimation of the yield gradient or the direction of movement in the space of designable parameters. In this study, we use the theory of circuit class, which allows evaluating the performance of inflation technique over a large number of realistic circuits. The optimal range of the inflation factor is analytically obtained for practical applications. The presented theoretical results confirm the application results reported in the related literature