Efficient Statistical Analysis for Correlated Rare Failure Events via Asymptotic Probability Approximation

In this article, a novel asymptotic probability approximation (APA) method is proposed to estimate the overall rare probability of correlated failure events for complex circuits containing a large number of replicated cells (e.g., SRAM bit-cells). The key idea of APA is to approximate the overall circuit failure rate based on a set of carefully defined failure events. An efficient hierarchical subset simulation (H-SUS) method is developed to calculate the aforementioned failure rate and a statistical methodology is further proposed to estimate the confidence interval of APA. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that APA can accurately and reliably estimate the overall failure rate of correlated rare failure events involving more than 20 000 independent random variables.