Automatic Selection of Process Corner Simulations for Faster Design Verification

Integrated circuit designs are verified in simulation over a set of process corners, which are combinations of expected transistor properties, power supply voltages, and die temperatures. The simulation time per corner can be long and semiconductor processes can have more than 1000 corners. Simulation is thus a serious bottleneck in design verification. We propose an algorithm that selects the smallest number of process corner simulations that are required to estimate minimum and/or maximum values of the output functions that model circuit behavior. Using our best corner selection algorithm, the required number of process corner simulations is reduced by an average of 79% (a speed-up of 4.71) with respect to a set of 46 output functions from nine industrial benchmark circuits.