一种容老化的可配置的电路失效预测传感器的研究

With the shrink of technology to scale, circuit instability caused by aging is becoming an increasingly serious problem. Circuit failure prediction is applicable for overcoming this reliability challenge. It is possible due to the gradual nature of aging degradation. Aging sensor is a special on-chip circuit used for circuit failure prediction. In this paper, a novel integrated sensor with configurable delay element for circuit failure prediction is proposed, in order to improve the detection rate, we can adjust the delay of our delay element which finally forms the guard band interval for different aging severity in the aging process. Moreover, by integrating the function of latch, our stability checker does not need another additional latch to store the output. Feedback circuit in our design can complete latch function perfectly. And the area overhead of our design is significantly lower by comparing with the classical structure. It reduces the area increase by about 30% on the average. Results from the Spice simulation illustrate the feasibility of this work.