种新型的基于功能复用的老化预测传感器设计.docVIP

 A Novel Aging Sensor with Function Reuse for Circuit Failure Prediction# 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 SHI Dongxia, LIANG Huaguo, HUANG Zhengfeng, LIU Yanbin** (School of Electronic Science and Applied Physics, Hefei University of Technology,hefei,230009) Abstract: Aging is becoming one of the most concerning problems for integrated circuits manufactured under ultra-deep sub-micrometer technology, which seriously influences the life span of a chip due to resulting in circuit failure. The existing techniques can only used to detect circuit faults after faults appear. In this paper, a novel on-line circuit aging detecting sensor is designed and inserted between the outputs of a combinational logic and flip-flops to predict circuit failure before errors occur. A stability checker is presented in the sensor, which can not only detect abnormal time delay of a circuit, but also store the detecting result without using any additional latches to retain the output signal when the checker is active, therefore predicting circuit failure. Simulation is executed for benchmarks circuits under 32nm CMOS technology. Experimental results show that compared with the aging detecting schemes recently proposed in the literature, using our technique, the detecting sensor has much less area overhead with lower power dissipation and time delay. Key words: Aging sensor, circuit failure prediction, reliability. 0 Introduction The transistors of the circuit will degrade gradually during its working lifetime, especially with the fast development of VLSI design. Transistors age over time can cause circuits degradation and induce delay of the output signal for the circuit. This delay can result in corrupt system data and states [1] and it also can degrade the circuit performance. The advancement of semiconductor technology [2] in the near future is a big challenge to the transistor aging. This is because that smaller process size makes transistors more likely to age. Unlike soft errors, the circ