Low-sensitivity to process variations aging sensor for automotive safety-critical applications
- 1 April 2010
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- p. 238-243
- https://doi.org/10.1109/vts.2010.5469568
Abstract
In this paper, circuit failure prediction by timing degradation is used to monitor semiconductor aging, which is a safety-critical problem in the automotive market. Reliability and variability issues are worsening with device scaling down. For safe operation, we propose on-chip, on-line aging monitoring. A novel aging sensor (to be selectively inserted in key locations in the design and to be activated from time to time) is proposed. The aging sensor is a programmable delay sensor, allowing decision-making for several degrees of severity in the aging process. It detects abnormal delays, regardless of their origin. Hence, it can uncover ¿normal¿ aging (namely, due to NBTI) and delay faults due to physical defects activated by long circuit operation. The proposed aging sensor has been optimized to exhibit low sensitivity to PVT (Process, power supply Voltage and Temperature) variations. Moreover, the area overhead of the new architecture is significantly less than the one of other aging sensors presented in the literature. Simulation results with a 65 nm sensor design are presented, ascertaining its usefulness and its low sensitivity, in particular to process variations.Keywords
This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- Programmable aging sensor for automotive safety-critical applicationsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2010
- Built-in aging monitoring for safety-critical applicationsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2009
- Adaptive techniques for overcoming performance degradation due to aging in digital circuitsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2009
- Optimized Circuit Failure Prediction for Aging: Practicality and PromisePublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2008
- NBTI resilient circuits using adaptive body biasingPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2008
- Circuit Failure Prediction and Its Application to Transistor Aging26th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium (vts 2008), 2007
- A Novel Delay Fault Testing Methodology Using Low-Overhead Built-In Delay SensorIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2006
- Implementation of MOSFET based capacitors for digital applicationsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2006
- Temporal Performance Degradation under NBTI: Estimation and Design for Improved Reliability of Nanoscale CircuitsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2006
- Self-checking detection and diagnosis of transient, delay, and crosstalk faults affecting bus linesIEEE Transactions on Computers, 2000