Statistical circuit performance variability minimization under manufacturing variations

In this paper, we present a flow to minimize the variability of a circuit performance measure due to the statistical variations in the manufacturing process. The flow starts with 0.18mum worst case corner device model parameters and transforms them to uncorrelated random variables for the statistical design of experiments which generate response surface models (RSM) of the circuit variability in terms of the circuit designable parameters. The minimization of variance due to process fluctuations is performed on the RSM functions by changing the circuit designable parameters, such as channel widths of the devices without causing excessive mean response shifts. Finally, the mean response is re-adjusted using the designable parameters that are not used in the variability minimization