Fast hot-carrier reliability diagnosis using macro-models

A new macromodel-based reliability diagnosis program (iRULE) is presented for design of hot-carrier resistant VLSI circuits. iRULE detects first the potentially critical transistors by using netlist- and geometry-based rules and then determines the criticality of hot-carrier degradation in those transistors by using macro-models. The algorithmic complexity of iRULE is shown to be linear with respect to the number of logic gates. iRULE is capable of performing reliability diagnosis for CMOS circuits containing over one million transistors.