A prognostic cell for electromigration failure of integrated circuit

As we know, expendable prognostic cell, such as "canary" and fuse, is a kind of method that can be applied for prognostics, and it fails earlier than the host product, which provides advance warning of failure. In this paper, a prognostic cell was proposed for electromigration (EM) failure of integrated circuit(IC), and it is composed of stress and detection module, two-stage low gain amplifier, high gain comparator, non-overlapping clock generation module, bias voltage generation module, and output module. The prognostic cell was designed to fail faster than host circuit, and was successfully simulated on the base of SMIC 0.18 urn mixed-signal CMOS process model. The output of the prognostic cell could accurately flip from low voltage to high voltage as the amount of resistance increased by more than 20% caused by EM, and the function was verified experimentally. This indicates the impending failure of host circuit, which shows that the present prognostic cell can be used to provide advance warning of EM failure. The research results are useful for the reliability insurance and failure prediction of IC.