Nanoelectronic COupled Problems Solutions: uncertainty quantification for analysis and optimization of an RFIC interference problem

Abstract

The FP7 project nanoCOPS (the 7th Framework Programme project Nanoelectronic COupled Problems Solutions) derived new methods for simulation during development of designs of integrated products. It has covered advanced simulation techniques for electromagnetics with feedback couplings to electronic circuits, heat and stress. It was inspired by interest from semiconductor industry and by a simulation tool vendor in electronic design automation. Due to the application of higher frequencies and the continuous down-scaling process, there is a higher probability of unforeseen interactions between different domains of a Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC), which can lead to the variability of the output performance functions. Since these undesired phenomena ought to be investigated in the early phases of the integrated circuit (IC) design, in this work we formulate the robust optimization problem in terms of the expectation and the standard deviation values under the uncertainties of material parameters. Therein, the statistical information included in the multi-objective functional can be provided by a response surface model. For this purpose the Stochastic Collocation Method (SCM) combined with Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) has been used. The reason for analyzing the variability of the Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) is, on the one hand, to quantify the uncertainty in an integrated Radio-Frequency Complementary Metal-Oxide Semi-Conductor (RFCMOS) transceiver design, and, on the other hand, to improve this design in a robust sense. We have illustrated our methodology for an integrated Radio-Frequency Complementary Metal-Oxide Semi-Conductor (RFCMOS) transceiver design.