A dynamic self-adaptive correction method for error resilient application

The aggressive scaling down technology has posed transistor aging to be a new challenging to the reliability of circuits. Transistor aging could cause the gradual degradation of circuit performance and eventually lead to timing error. In this paper, a dynamic self-adaptive method is proposed to protect the circuit from the influence of transistor aging. This makes use of aging detection sensors and self-adaptive clock scaling cell. Aging sensors would automatically wake up the clock scaling cell to shift the clock phase of circuits when an error occurs. Then the timing error would be masked by a second sampling with the shifted clock. The method is simulated by Hspice using 65nm technology. The evaluation results show that this method is effective to error resilient with no impact on normal function of circuits, and it improves the MTTF by 1.16 times with 22.73% circuit overheads on average when the phase difference is 20% clock cycle.