Multi-Corner Parametric Yield Estimation via Bayesian Inference on Bernoulli Distribution with Conjugate Prior

Jiahe Shi, Zhengqi Gao, Jun Tao, Yangfeng Su, Dian Zhou, Xuan Zeng

Abstract: To efficiently estimate parametric yields over multiple process, voltage, temperature corners for binary output circuits, we propose a novel Bayesian Inference method based on Bernoulli distribution with conjugate prior in this paper. The key idea is to adopt a product of Beta distributions as the conjugate prior for the yields and encode circuit performance correlations among different corners into this prior. Next, the hyper-parameters are optimized by using multi-start Quasi-Newton method, and the yields over different corners are estimated via maximum-a-posteriori. Two circuit examples demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to 3.0× cost reduction over the state-of-the-art methods without surrendering any accuracy.