Earth Mover's Distance as a Comparison Metric for Analog Behavior

Evaluating the outcome of analog simulations is a common, mostly manually carried out task in the pre-silicon verification process of mixed-signal ICs. Its non-automated nature makes it an error-prone and time-consuming procedure. For this very reason, we introduce a novel approach for performing this evaluation automatically resulting in significantly reduced turnaround times as well as a considerably increased reliability of verification results. The presented concept is motivated by an algorithm that is used in optical pattern recognition and is called Earth Mover’s Distance. Furthermore, we compare our approach with already existing algorithms, namely Frechet Distance and Pearson Coefficient, in order to analyze its capability. Finally, we present a case study in which we prove the algorithm by applying it to the results of a mixed-signal simulation at chip-level demonstrating the efficiency of our approach.