Accelerating Defect Simulation in Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits by Parallel Defect Injection

Parallel defect simulation has been popular in the digital domain due to its ability to reduce the time taken to reach the target percentage of defect coverage. One important requirement for such techniques is to identify non-interfering defects, that is, the presence of one defect does not interfere with the detection of the other. Due to the more complex relationship among analog nets, finding non-interfering defects is significantly difficult in the analog domain. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing an approach for identifying independent sub-circuits by exploring channel-connected sub-graphs in analog circuit netlists, thereby enabling parallel defect simulation in AMS circuits. We establish the benefits of our approach on industrial AMS circuits.