Kriging-Assisted Ultra-Fast Simulated-Annealing Optimization of a Clamped Bitline Sense Amplifier

Simulations using SPICE provide accurate design exploration but consume a considerable amount of time and can be infeasible for large circuits. The continued technology scaling requires that more circuit parameters are accounted for along with the process variation effects. Regression models have been widely researched and while they present an acceptable accuracy for simulation purposes, they fail to account for the strong correlation effect between parameters on the design. This paper presents an ultra-fast design-optimization flow that combines correlation-aware Kriging metamodels and a simulated annealing algorithm that operates on them. The Kriging-based method generates metamodels of a clamped bit line sense amplifier circuit which take into account the effects of correlation among the design and process parameters. A simulated annealing based optimization algorithm is used to optimize the circuit through the Kriging metamodel. The results show that the Kriging metamodels are very accurate with very low error. The optimization algorithm finds an optimized precharge time while keeping power consumption as constraint in an average execution time of 2.78 ms, as compared to a 45 minutes for an exhaustive search of the design space, i.e. close to 10⁶× faster. To the best of the authors´ knowledge this is the first paper that uses Kriging and simulated annealing for nano-CMOS design.