Circuit reliability estimation based on an iterative PTM model with hybrid coding

•A fast and highly accurate evaluation method for circuit reliability was proposed based on probabilistic transfer matrix model with hybrid coding.•An iterative strategy for reliability propagation was proposed based on a virtual method and a weak equivalence principle.•The method can be applied to the reliability evaluation for several-abstract-level circuits.

Using the probabilistic transfer matrix model as the major technology, this paper firstly separated the presentation and quantification of signal relations, and blocked the concurrent signals in fan-out by hybrid coding; secondly a method to construct the output reliability matrixes and output probability distributions of basic circuit components was proposed based on a virtual method; and then a method to achieve the reliability iterative propagation between the pre-stage and post-stage circuit was designed using a weak equivalence principle. The theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the proposed method can be applied to the reliability evaluation for several-abstract-level circuits that have high calculation precision and linear complexity in time and space.