BLAST: Efficient computation of nonlinear delay sensitivities in electronic and biological networks using barycentric lagrange enabled transient adjoint analysis

Abstract

Transient waveform sensitivities are useful in optimization and also provide direct insight into system metrics such as delay. We present a novel method for finding parametric waveform sensitivities that improves upon current transient adjoint methods, which suffer from quadratic complexity, by applying barycentric Lagrange interpolation to reduce computation to near linear in the time-interval of interest. We apply our technique to find sensitivities of a "nonlinear" Elmore-delay like metric in digital logic and biochemical pathway examples. Our technique achieves order-of-magnitude speedups over traditional adjoint and direct sensitivity computation.