Device-Level Experimental Observations of NBTI-Induced Random Timing Jitter

This paper utilizes device-level eye-diagram measurements to examine negative bias temperature instability (NBTI)-induced changes in timing jitter at circuit speeds. The measured jitter is examined for a variety of ring oscillator and pseudorandom gate patterns. The ring oscillator patterns were chosen to mimic typical NBTI reliability characterizations, whereas the pseudorandom patterns act as an approximation for real-world random logic. Our observations indicate that NBTI-induced jitter is gate pattern dependent and most severe for the pseudorandom case. Collectively, this paper strongly suggests that typical NBTI ring oscillator characterization methods are insensitive to random logic timing jitter.