BTI-aware design using variable latency units

Circuit degradation due to bias temperature instability (BTI) can lead to timing failures in digital circuits. We develop variable latency unit (VLU) based BTI-aware designs, with a novel scheme for multioutput hold logic implementation for VLUs. A key observation is the identification and exploitation of specific supersetting patterns in the two-dimensional space of frequency and aging of the circuit. The multioutput hold logic scheme is used in conjunction with an adaptive body bias framework to achieve high performance, allowing the design to be easily incorporated in traditional synthesis flows. As compared to conventional combinational BTI-resilience scheme, our design achieves an area reduction of 9.2%, with a significant throughput enhancement of 30.0%.