Digital Detection of Oxide Breakdown and Life-Time Extension in Submicron CMOS Technology (original) (raw)

Performance of analog circuits degrades over time due to several time-dependent degradation mechanisms. Due to the increased aging problems in ever-shrinking dimensions, reliability of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor analog circuits has become a major concern. Overdesign is a popular aging-aware circuit design approach, where circuit operation is guardbanded by choosing the design point beyond the optimal region. For the sake of reliability, power consumption and chip area are sacrificed in this approach, which is undesirable considering strict energy limitations in modern applications. Conversely, Sense and React (S8R) approach serves the same purpose without any additional power consumption, in which degradation of circuit features is detected by online monitoring and recovered immediately. Furthermore, such systems enable remote control and healing of circuits. However, design of an S8R system is quite complicated. In particular, determination of efficient aging signature...