Where is the Achilles Heel under Circuit Aging

The degradation of IC reliability is usually a gradual process, only causing moderate increase in the failure rate over time. However, under some specific circumstance, the degradation rate can be dramatically accelerated, leading to some catastrophic phenomena in digital and analog designs. Based on silicon data, this paper highlights such critical conditions, including severe frequency shift under DVS, asymmetric aging due to clock gating, and bias runaway. The analysis and solutions to these issues are vitally important to reliable IC design practice.