Reliable Interval Prediction of Minimum Operating Voltage Based on On-chip Monitors via Conformalized Quantile Regression

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distribution-free method using conformalized quantile regression and on-chip monitors to reliably predict minimum operating voltage intervals with guaranteed coverage, improving manufacturing testing and system safety.

Contribution

It presents a novel, distribution-free $V_{min}$ interval estimation technique with theoretical coverage guarantees, utilizing on-chip monitors for enhanced accuracy.

Findings

The proposed method achieves reliable coverage guarantees.

On-chip monitors significantly reduce interval length.

Effective on an industrial 5nm automotive chip dataset.

Abstract

Predicting the minimum operating voltage ($V_{min}$) of chips is one of the important techniques for improving the manufacturing testing flow, as well as ensuring the long-term reliability and safety of in-field systems. Current $V_{min}$ prediction methods often provide only point estimates, necessitating additional techniques for constructing prediction confidence intervals to cover uncertainties caused by different sources of variations. While some existing techniques offer region predictions, but they rely on certain distributional assumptions and/or provide no coverage guarantees. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel distribution-free $V_{min}$ interval estimation methodology possessing a theoretical guarantee of coverage. Our approach leverages conformalized quantile regression and on-chip monitors to generate reliable prediction intervals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on an industrial 5nm automotive chip dataset. Moreover, we show that the use of on-chip monitors can reduce the interval length significantly for $V_{min}$ prediction.