Abstract
The performance of nanometer-scale circuits is adversely affected by aging induced by bias temperature instability (BTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI). Both BTI and HCI impact transistor electrical parameters at a level that depends on the operating environment and usage of the circuit. This paper presents a novel method, using on-chip sensors based on ring oscillators (ROSCs), to detect the delay shifts in circuits as a result of aging. Our method uses presilicon analysis of the circuit to compute calibration factors that can translate BTI- and HCI-induced delay shifts in the ROSC to those in the circuit of interest. Our simulations show that the delay estimates are within 1% of the true values from presilicon analysis. Further, for post-silicon analysis, a refinement strategy is proposed where sensor measurements can be amalgamated with infrequent online delay measurements on the monitored circuit to partially capture its true workloads. This leads to about 8% lower delay guardbanding overheads compared to the conventional methods as demonstrated using benchmark circuits.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Article number | 7807330 |
Pages (from-to) | 1688-1701 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Ms. Sengupta was a recipient of the prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota due to excellence in research in course of her Ph.D.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1982-2012 IEEE.
Keywords
- Aging
- bias temperature instability (BTI)
- hot carrier injection (HCI)
- ring oscillators (ROSCs)
- static timing analysis (STA)