Statistical characterization of standard cells using design of experiments with response surface modeling

This paper presents an approach for statistical characterization of standard cells based on a combination of Statistical Design of Experiments (S-DoE) and Response Surface Modeling. Unlike both, most of the State-of-the-Art and Sensitivity Analysis (SA) techniques currently offered by EDA vendors, S-DoE preserves the underlying correlation among process variation parameters. This results in about two orders of magnitude of statistical accuracy improvement, yet it features an electrical simulation effort linear to the cell complexity. The technique is validated using a representative subset of standard cells using a 32nm statistical Physical Design Kit.