Title :
Berkeley reliability tools-BERT
Author :
Tu, Robert H. ; Rosenbaum, Elyse ; Chan, Wilson Y. ; Li, Chester C. ; Minami, Eric ; Quader, Khandker ; Ko, Ping Keung ; Hu, Chenming
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
fDate :
10/1/1993 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Berkeley reliability tools (BERT) simulates the circuit degradation (drift) due to hot-electron degradation in MOSFETs and bipolar transistors and predicts circuit failure rates due to oxide breakdown and electromigration in CMOS, bipolar, and BiCMOS circuits. With the increasing importance of reliability in today´s and future technology, a reliability simulator such as this is expected to serve as the engine of design-for-reliability in a building-in-reliability paradigm. BERT works in conjunction with a circuit simulator such as SPICE in order to simulate reliability for actual circuits, and, like SPICE, acts as an interactive tool for design. BERT is introduced and the current work being done is summarized. BERT is used to study the reliability of a BiCMOS inverter chain, and performance data are presented
Keywords :
BiCMOS integrated circuits; CMOS integrated circuits; SPICE; bipolar integrated circuits; circuit reliability; digital simulation; failure analysis; BERT; Berkeley reliability tools; BiCMOS circuits; CMOS; MOSFETs; SPICE; bipolar IC; bipolar transistors; building-in-reliability paradigm; circuit degradation; circuit failure rates; design-for-reliability; electromigration; hot-electron degradation; inverter chain; oxide breakdown; performance data; BiCMOS integrated circuits; Bipolar transistors; Bit error rate; Circuit simulation; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Electromigration; MOSFETs; Predictive models; SPICE;
Journal_Title :
Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on
