IEEE/ACM Workshop on Variability Modeling and Characterization

It is widely recognized that process variation is emerging as a fundamental challenge to IC design in scaled CMOS technology; and it will have profound impact on nearly all aspects of circuit performance. While some of the negative effects of variability can be handled with improvements in the manufacturing process, the industry is starting to accept the fact that some of the effects are better mitigated during the design process. Handling variability in the design process will require accurate and appropriate models of variability and its dependence on designable parameters (i.e. layout), and its spatial and temporal distributions. It also requires carefully designed test structures and proper statistical data analysis methods to extract meaningful models from large volumes of silicon measurements. The resulting compact modeling of systematic, random, spatial, and temporal variations is essential to abstract the physical level variations into a format the designers (and more importantly, the tools they use) can utilize. This workshop provides a forum to discuss current practice as well as near future research needs in test structure design, variability characterization, compact variability modeling, and statistical simulation.