Classifying circuit performance using active-learning guided support vector machines

Leveraging machine learning has been proven as a promising avenue for addressing many practical circuit design and verification challenges. We demonstrate a novel active learning guided machine learning approach for characterizing circuit performance. When employed under the context of support vector machines, the proposed probabilistically weighted active learning approach is able to dramatically reduce the size of the training data, leading to significant reduction of the overall training cost. The proposed active learning approach is extended to the training of asymmetric support vector machine classifiers, which is further sped up by a global acceleration scheme. We demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed techniques using three case studies: PLL lock-time verification, SRAM yield analysis and prediction of chip peak temperature using a limited number of on-chip temperature sensors.