Design of prognostic circuit for hot carrier injection failure of integrated circuit

Prognostics and health management has become a preferred approach to achieve warning or respond to impending failure of electronic systems. A prognostic circuit for hot carrier injection (HCI) failure of integrated circuit was proposed in the paper, and it was simulated on the base of the SMIC 0.18 um mixed-signal CMOS process model. The prognostic circuit consists of stress voltage generation module, HCI failure detecting module, two-stage comparator, offset voltage cancellation module, non-overlapping clock generation module, and output module. When the increase amount of threshold voltage for the MOSFET exceeds a preset value due to hot carrier injection, the output of the prognostic circuit designed to fail faster will jump from low voltage to high voltage. It indicates the impending failure of hosted circuit because of that the prognostic circuit experiences the same manufacturing process and operational environment as the hosted circuit. The research results are useful for the prediction of HCI degradation and failure of integrated circuit.