New insights into the design for end-of-life variability of NBTI in scaled high-κ/metal-gate Technology for the nano-reliability era

In this paper, a new methodology for the assessment of end-of-life variability of NBTI is proposed for the first time. By introducing the concept of characteristic failure probability, the uncertainty in the predicted 10-year VDD is addressed. Based on this, variability resulted from NBTI degradation at end of life under specific VDD is extensively studied with a novel characterization technique. With the further circuit level analysis based on this new methodology, the timing margin can be relaxed. The new methodology has also been extended to FinFET in this work. The wide applicability of this methodology is helpful to future reliability/variability-aware circuit design in nano-CMOS technology.