Managing Bias-Temperature Instability for Product Reliability

A NBTI model has been generated which takes into consideration AC recovery. This model can be used to improve the connection between the DC stress measurements of a discrete device and AC product usage in a real device. The model can be incorporated into circuit aging simulations to check the NBTI degradation for a simple circuit. For complicated circuitry such as CPU, NBTI degradation should be managed through process optimization, circuit timing design, and product test guardband to ensure that products meet customer spec and lifetime usage.