Patent ID: 9483602
Filing Date: 2016-11-01
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A non-transitory, tangible computer-readable medium having recorded thereon instructions for execution by a computer to carry out a method to identify rare-event failures of an electrical circuit design (ECD), the ECD having associated thereto process variables and performance metrics, the performance metrics being dependent on the process variables, the process variables having a probability distribution, the method comprising: generating a set of points from the probability distribution of the process variables; selecting a subset of points from the set of points; simulating the ECD for each point of the subset of points, to obtain simulation data; in accordance with the simulation data, calculating a value of a performance metric for each point of the subset of points, to obtain a set of performance metric values, the performance metric having associated thereto a target value; in accordance with the set of performance metric values and with the values of the process variables for each point of the subset of points, building a model of the performance metric as a function of the process variables; in accordance with the model, obtaining, for remaining points of the set of points, respective modeled performance metric values and, ordering the remaining points as a function of their respective modeled performance metric values, to obtain a set of ordered remaining points; and displaying a count of a number of ECD failures, to obtain a displayed count of ECD failures by, starting with a selected ordered remaining point from the set of ordered remaining points, iteratively repeating the following actions a-e until a stop condition is met: