A big-data approach to handle process variations: Uncertainty quantification by tensor recovery

Stochastic spectral methods have become a popular technique to quantify the uncertainties of nano-scale devices and circuits. They are much more efficient than Monte Carlo for certain design cases with a small number of random parameters. However, their computational cost significantly increases as the number of random parameters increases. This paper presents a big-data approach to solve high-dimensional uncertainty quantification problems. Specifically, we simulate integrated circuits and MEMS at only a small number of quadrature samples; then, a huge number of (e.g., 1.5×1027) solution samples are estimated from the available small-size (e.g., 500) solution samples via a low-rank and tensor-recovery method. Numerical results show that our algorithm can easily extend the applicability of tensor-product stochastic collocation to IC and MEMS problems with over 50 random parameters, whereas the traditional algorithm can only handle several random parameters.