Recursive Statistical Blockade: An Enhanced Technique for Rare Event Simulation With Application to SRAM Circuit Design

Circuit reliability under statistical process variation is an area of growing concern. For highly replicated circuits such as SRAMs and flip flops, a rare statistical event for one circuit may induce a not-so-rare system failure. The authors of proposed Statistical Blockade as a Monte Carlo technique that allows one to efficiently filter - to block - unwanted samples insufficiently rare in the tail distributions they seek. However, there are significant practical problems with the technique. In this work, they show common scenarios in SRAM design where these problems render Statistical Blockade ineffective.