Sensitivity Analysis for Active Sampling, with Applications to the Simulation of Analog Circuits

Abstract: We propose an active sampling flow, with the use-case of simulating the impact of combined variations on analog circuits. In such a context, given the large number of parameters, it is difficult to fit a surrogate model and to efficiently explore the space of design features. By combining a drastic dimension reduction using sensitivity analysis and Bayesian surrogate modeling, we obtain a flexible active sampling flow. On synthetic and real datasets, this flow outperforms the usual Monte-Carlo sampling which often forms the foundation of design space exploration.