Failure diagnosis of asymmetric aging under NBTI

Design for reliability is becoming an important step in the design cycle with CMOS technology scaling, demanding need for efficient and accurate reliability simulation methods in the design stage. Traditional aging analysis does not differentiate NBTI induced delay shift in rising and falling edges, thereby assuming averaging effect due to recovery. It is essential to identify the critical operation conditions that are more susceptible to timing violations under aging. In this paper, by identifying the critical moments in circuit operation and considering the asymmetric aging effects, timing violations under NBTI effect are correctly predicted. The unique features of this work include: (1) delay modeling of a digital gate due to threshold voltage (V_th) shift using delay dependence on supply voltage from cell library; (2) asymmetric aging analysis is conducted by recognizing the critical points in circuit operation; and (3) setup and hold timing violations due to NBTI induced path delay shift in logic and clock buffer are investigated. This failure assessment method is further demonstrated in ISCAS89 benchmark circuits using 45nm Nangate standard cell library to extract aging information in critical paths. The proposed failure diagnosis enables resilient design techniques to mitigate circuit aging under NBTI.