On-chip aging compensation for output driver

In this paper an on-chip aging compensation technique for CMOS output driver is proposed. It contains an aging compensation cell which will detect the degradation in the ON current (I_ON) of output driver due to the HCI and BTI effect. Based on the degradation in the I_ON the aging compensation cell will generate aging compensation codes AP[0:3] for PMOS driver and AN[0:3] for NMOS driver. These aging compensation codes will increase the drive strength of output driver to compensate the degradation in I_ON of output driver due to HCI and BTI effect. The proposed design is implemented in 40nm CMOS process by using 1.8V thick-oxide (32Å) devices. The measurement result shows that by using the proposed aging compensation technique the impact of aging on output driver get reduced by 70% after 10 years of operation.