Reliability optimization of analog integrated circuits considering the trade-off between lifetime and area

The reliability of analog integrated circuits becomes a major concern for the semiconductor industry as technology continuously scales. Among the many contributing factors, manufacturing process induced parameter variations and lifetime operational-condition-dependent transistor aging are two major hurdles limiting the reliability of analog circuits. Process variations mainly influence the parametric yield value of the fresh circuits, while transistor aging due to physical effects, such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI), will cause another yield loss during circuit lifetime. In the past decades, the two issues were mainly studied separately by various communities, but analog designers nowadays need an accurate yet efficient method to analyze and optimize their circuits during the design phase, to ensure a more robust design tolerant of such joint effects.This paper proposes an efficient method for sizing of analog circuits for reliability. It is based on the analysis and optimization of the fresh worst-case distance value for each circuit performance, which can be used to characterize the robustness of circuits considering process variations and aging effects in terms of x-sigma. The fresh and aged sizing rules as well as the maximum area constraints are checked during the optimization. The trade-off between the circuit lifetime and the price we pay in terms of layout area is studied in detail. According to the result of this trade-off analysis, a longer circuit lifetime requires more total area to be spent in layout, and designers can ensure the circuit robustness with certain layout area consumption.     

Software tools for analyzing NBTI-induced digital circuit degradation

 s semiconductor manufacturing migrates to more advanced technology nodes, accelerated aging effect for nanoscale devices poses as a key challenge for designers to find countermeasures that effectively mitigate the degradation and prolong system’s lifetime. Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is emerging as one of the major reliability concerns. Two software tools for NBTI analyzing are proposed in this paper, one for transistor-level, and the other for gate-level. The transistor-level can be used to estimate the delay degradation due to NBTI effect very accurately, while the gate-level can be used for repeat analysis in circuit optimization because of its fast computing speed.     

基于故障插入的电路抗老化输入矢量生成研究

随着CMOS工艺特征尺寸的不断缩小,晶体管的老化效应严重影响了电路的可靠性,负偏置温度不稳定性(NBTI)是造成晶体管老化的主要因素之一。提出了一种基于固定故障插入的电路抗老化输入矢量生成方法,在电路的合适位置插入固定故障,通过自动测试向量生成(ATPG)工具获取较小的备选抗老化矢量集合,再从中筛选出最优矢量。由该方法生成的输入矢量可以使电路在待机模式下处于最大老化恢复状态,同时具有较小的时间开销。在ISCAS85电路中的仿真结果表明,与随机矢量生成方法相比,在电路待机模式下加载本文方法生成的输入矢量,可以达到最高17%的电路老化时延改善率。     

A new hybrid algorithm for analog ICs optimization based on the shrinking circles technique

This paper presents a novel technique named the Shrinking Circles to enhance the performance of optimization algorithms embedded in automated sizing tools of analog ICs. This technique creates a balance between the exploration and exploitation capabilities when the optimization algorithm is converging to a possible optimum point. With the help of the shrinking circles concept, we upgrade a hybridization version of Gravitational Search Algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization (Advanced GSA_PSO). Accordingly, a developed tool for the automation of analog ICs sizing is proposed. The performance of this tool is evaluated by two cases: minimizing the power consumption of a two-stage CMOS op-amp and simultaneous minimizing the circuit area and power consumption of a folded-cascode op-amp. In this paper, the corners analysis is also incorporated into the proposed circuit sizing tool based on a straightforward procedure by which this tool not only can obtain the solutions being robust against process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations, but also it alleviates the computational burden. Comparisons with available methods show that the proposed tool performs much better in terms of efficiency.     

Time-Efficient Identification Method for Aging Critical Gates Considering Topological Connection

The shrinking silicon feature size causes the continuous increment of the aging effect due to the negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), which becomes a potential stopper for IC development. As the basis of circuit-level aging protection, an efficient aging critical-gate identification method is crucially required to select a set of gates for protection to guarantee the normal lifetime of the circuits. The existing critical-gate identification methods always depend on a critical path set which contains so many paths that its generation procedure requires undesirable CPU runtime; furthermore, these methods can achieve a better solution with taking account of the topological connection. This paper proposes a time-efficient critical gates identification method with topological connection analysis, which chooses a small set of critical gates. Experiments over many circuits of ITC99 and ISCAS benchmark demonstrate that, to guarantee the normal lifetime (e.g., 10 years) of each circuit, our method achieves a 3.97x speedup and saves as much as 27.21% area overhead compared with the existing methods.     

NBTI-Aware Design of Integrated Circuits: A Hardware-Based Approach for Increasing Circuits’ Life Time

Advances in CMOS technology have made possible the increase of integrated circuit’s density, which impacts directly on the circuit’s performance. However, technology scaling poses some reliability concerns that directly affect the circuit’s lifetime. One of the most important issues in nanoscale circuits is related to the time-dependent variation caused by Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). This phenomenon increases the threshold voltage of pMOS transistors, which introduces delay along the integrated circuits’ paths, eventually causing functional failures. In this paper, a hardware-based technique able to increase the lifetime of Integrated Circuits (ICs) is proposed. In more detail, the technique is based on an on-chip sensor able to monitor IC’s aging and to adjust its power supply voltage in order to minimize NBTI effects and increase the circuit’s lifetime. Experimental results obtained throughout simulations demonstrate the technique’s efficiency, since the circuit’s lifetime has been increased by 150 %. Finally, the analysis of the main overheads introduced as well as the impact related to process variation renders the evaluation of the proposed approach possible.     

Aging signature properties and an efficient signature determination tool for online monitoring

Increased reliability problems in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies have led to a dramatic decrease of lifetime of analog integrated circuits. To palliate this problem, several reliability-aware design approaches have been developed. Reconfigurable circuit design is one of those approaches, which is based on reconfiguring the circuit considering degradation in circuit performances. Sense & React (S & R) approach is the well-known reconfigurable design approach, where degradation in circuit performances are sensed and a pre-established recovery operation is applied to heal the circuit. In practice, indirect measurements are preferred during sense operation, in which electrical quantities are measured in order to determine time to recovery. Determination of the time to recover is the most critical part of a S & R system. One or more circuit variables are selected out of all measurable circuit quantities. The selected signature should have some attributes to be used as the aging signature to reduce the measurement cost. However, efficient aging signature properties have not been defined in the literature yet. Moreover, the designer determines the aging signature manually by performing an iterative search and evaluation on aging simulation results, and there is no tool to ease this time consuming process. This paper clearly describes the aging signature properties and proposes an automatic signature selection tool that determines the most efficient signature for sense operation.     

Variability aware SVM macromodel based design centering of analog circuits

Design centering is the term used for a procedure of obtaining enhanced parametric yield of a circuit despite the variations in device and design parameters. The process variability in nanometer regimes manifest into variations in these devices and design parameters. During design space exploration of analog circuits, a methodology to find design-instances with better yield is necessitated; this would ensure that the circuit will function as per specifications after fabrication, even with impact of statistical variations. We need to evaluate circuit performance for a given instance of a circuit-design identified by possessing a set of nominal values of device-design parameters. A lot of instances need be searched, having different sizes for a given circuit topology. HSPICE is very compute intensive. Instead, we employ macromodeling approach for analog circuits based on support vector machine (SVM), which enables efficient evaluation of performance of such circuits of different sizing during yield optimization loops. These performance macromodels are found to be as accurate as SPICE and at the same time, time-efficient for use in sizing of analog circuits with optimal yield. Process variability aware SVM macromodels are first trained and then used inside the Genetic algorithm loops for design centering of different circuits, subsequently resulting into sized-circuit instances having optimal yield. Post design centering, the sized circuits will be able to provide functions as per specifications upon fabrication. The application of this design centering approach as process variability analysis tool is illustrated on various circuits e.g. two stage op amp, voltage controlled oscillator and mixer circuit with layouts drawn into 90?nm UMC technology (Euro-practice).     

NBTI degradation and its impact for analog circuit reliability

A methodology to quantify the degradation at circuit level due to negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has been proposed in this work. Using this approach, a variety of analog/mixed-signal circuits are simulated, and their degradation is analyzed. It has been shown that the degradation in circuit performance is mainly dependent on the circuit configuration and its application rather than the absolute value of degradation at the device level. In circuits such as digital-to-analog converters, NBTI can pose a serious reliability concern, as even a small variation in bias currents can cause significant gain errors.     

Net-Sensitivity-Based Optimization of Large-Scale Field-Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) Placement and Routing

Modern advances in reconfigurable technologies are allowing analog circuit designers to benefit from the computational flexibility provided by large-scale field-programmable analog arrays. With the component density of these devices, small analog circuits, as well as larger analog systems, can be synthesized and tested in a shorter time and at a lower cost, compared with the full design cycle. However, automated development platforms and computer-aided design tools for these devices are far fewer than the physical synthesis tools for their digital counterparts. One of the major reasons for this is the considerably higher impact of interconnect parasitics on circuit functionality in the analog domain; therefore, performance optimization must be recognized as an indispensable step of the analog physical synthesis flow. Our goal in this brief is to present a physical synthesis framework with an optimization core and an integrated simulation environment for verification of the synthesis results. Although SPICE has been used as the simulation tool for our experiments, there is no dependency on a particular circuit simulator. Our synthesis tool currently accepts SPICE netlists as input and gives priority to user-specified metrics when optimizing the synthesized circuit performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.     

CSAM: A clock skew-aware aging mitigation technique

In this work, we propose a clock skew-aware aging mitigation (CSAM) technique which considers the effect of asymmetric aging both on logic path and clock tree together. Simultaneous consideration of both parts in the design optimization problem enables us to reduce the area overhead while increasing the lifetime. For the aging mitigation of the logic path, we make use of both internal node control (INC) and input vector control (IVC) techniques while, for the clock tree circuits, a proper choice between NAND or NOR based integrated clock gating (ICG) cell is made. The optimization may be performed based on two objective functions of maximizing lifetime or minimizing the area overhead for a predetermined clock frequency and lifetime. To assess the efficacy of the proposed technique, we compared the lifetimes and area overheads for a set of circuits from ISCAS89 and ITC99 benchmark suites when CSAM and conventional techniques are used. The results, obtained using SPICE simulations for the circuits in a 45-nm technology, reveals that an average lifetime improvement of 34% and an average area overhead reduction of 25.7% for the two objective functions, respectively.     

Γ (Gamma): A SaaS-enabled fast and accurate analog design System

With ever increasing demand for lower power consumption, lower cost, and higher performance, designing analog circuits to meet design specifications has become an increasing challenging task, Analog circuit designers must, on one hand, have intimate knowledge about the underlining silicon process technology׳s capability to achieve the desired specifications. They must, on the other hand, understand the impact of tweaking circuits to satisfy a given specification on all circuit performance parameters. Analog designers have traditionally learned to tackle design problems with numerous circuit simulations using accurate circuit simulators such as SPICE, and have increasingly relied on trial-and-error approaches to reach a converging point. However, the increased complexity with each generation of silicon technology and high dimensionality of searching for solutions, even for some simple analog circuits, have made the trial-and-error approach extremely inefficient, causing long design cycles and often missed deadlines. Novel rapid and accurate circuit evaluation methods that are tightly integrated with circuit search and optimization methods are needed to aid design productivity.Furthermore, the current design environment with fully distributed licensing and supporting structures is cumbersome at best to allow efficient and up-to-date support for design engineers. With increasing support and licensing costs, fewer and fewer design centers can afford it. Cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) model provides new opportunities for CAD applications. It enables immediate software delivery and update to customers at very low cost. SaaS tools benefit from fast feedback and sharing channels between users and developers and run on hardware resources tailored and provided for them by the software vendor. On the downside, web-based tools are expected to perform in a very short turn-around schedule and be always responsive.This paper presents a list of innovations that come together to a new class of analog design tools: 1). Lookup table-based approach (LUT) to model complex transistor behavior provides both the necessary accuracy and speed essential for repeated circuit evaluations. 2). The proposed system architecture tight integrate the novel LUT approach with novel system level functions to allow further significantly better accuracy/speed tradeoff and faster design convergence with designer׳s intent. 3). Incorporating use inputs at key junctures of the design process allows the tool to better capture designer׳s intent and improve design convergence. 4). The combination of high accuracy and faster evaluation time make it possible to incorporate SaaS features, such as short solution space navigation steps and crowdsourcing, into the tool. This allows sharing of server-side resources between many users. Instead of fully automating a signoff circuit optimization process, the proposed tool provides effective aid to analog circuit designers with a dash-board control of many important circuit parameters with several orders faster in computation time than SPICE simulations.     

An efficient NBTI sensor and compensation circuit for stable and reliable SRAM cells

Aggressive technology scaling causes unavoidable reliability issues in modern high-performance integrated circuits. The major reliability factors in nanoscale VLSI design is the negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) degradation and soft-errors in the space and terrestrial environment. In this paper, an on-chip analog adaptive body bias (OA-ABB) circuit to compensate the degradation due to NBTI aging is presented. The OA-ABB is used to compensate the parameter variations and improves the SRAM circuit yield regarding read current, hold SNM, read SNM, write margin and word line write margin (WLWM). The OA-ABB consists of standby leakage current sensor circuit, decision circuit and body bias control circuit. Circuit level simulation for SRAM cell is performed for pre- and post-stress of 10 years NBTI aging. The proposed OA-ABB reduces the effect of NBTI on the stability of SRAM cell. The simulation results show the hold SNM, read SNM and WLWM decreases by 10.55%, 8.55%, and 3.25% respectively in the absence of OA-ABB whereas hold SNM, read SNM and WLWM decreases by only 0.61%, 1.48%, and 0.72% respectively by using OA-ABB to compensate the degradation. The figure of merit of 6T SRAM cell also improved by 17.24% with the use of OA-ABB.     

ARIADNE: A constraint-based approach to computer-aided synthesis and modeling of Analog integrated circuits

The ARIADNE approach to computer-aided synthesis and modeling of analog circuits is presented. It is a mathematical approach based on the use of equations. Equations are regarded as constraints on a circuit's design space and analog circuit design is modeled as a constraint satisfaction problem. To generate and efficiently satisfy constraints, advanced computational techniques such as constraint propagation, interval propagation, symbolic simulation, and qualitative simulation are applied. These techniques cover design problems such as topology construction, modeling, nominal analysis, tolerance analysis, sizing and optimization of analog circuits. The advantage of this approach is the clear separation of design knowledge from design procedures. Design knowledge is modeled in declarative equation-based models (DEBMs). Design procedures are implemented into general applicable CAD tools. The ARIADNE approach closely matches the reasoning style applied by experienced designers. The integration of synthesis and modeling into one frame and the clear separation of design knowledge from design procedures eases the process of extending the synthesis system with new circuit topologies, turning it into an open design system. This system can be used by both inexperienced and experienced designers in either interactive or automated mode.     

Operational-amplifier compilation with performance optimization

A method for designing analog circuits in which topological design is followed by simultaneous device sizing and layout design is described. By merging circuit and layout design into a single design process, analog circuits can be optimally designed taking layout parasitics fully into account. Using the method, a CMOS operational-amplifier compiler (OAC) has been developed. Given a set of performance specifications and process parameters, OAC generates a layout with circuit performance optimized to meet specified performance constraints. A procedural layout technique is employed to generate a compact and practical layout. A nonlinear optimization method for device sizing which relies on the results of simulations based on the circuit extracted from the layout is applied. Design experiments have shown that OAC can produce satisfactory results with respect to both circuit performance and layout density     

A Reliability-Aware Methodology to Isolate Timing-Critical Paths under Aging

Temporal unreliability due to aging, such as Negative-Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) effects etc., in the CMOS circuits may not appear just after the chip production, instead it becomes apparent when it is used under certain workload and environmental conditions over time. Identifying aged paths that may become critical to circuit performance, is a real challenge for many researchers and reliability engineers. In this work, firstly we identify a set of parameters that impact the circuit performance under aging and use them in the proposed algorithm which is substantially faster than commercially available SPICE simulator with an approx 94% accuracy in estimating path delays. Secondly, we explore the possibility of using the proposed methodology, instead of using time expensive SPICE and pessimistic static timing analysis (STA), to identify a set of speed-limiting paths under aging. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the associated methodology in comparison to SPICE simulated results.     

A novel high-throughput method for table look-up based analog design automation

Analog circuit synthesis ofen requires repeated evaluations of circuit under design to reach the final design goals. Circuit simulations using SPICE can provide accurate assessment of circuit performance. Spice simulations are costly and incur significant overhead. A faster transistor-level evaluation is needed to provide higher throughput for synthesis applications. Further, miniaturization of FET’s has added physical effects into SPICE models, which complicated their equations with every generation. That complication has forced analog synthesis tool developers and circuit designers alike to perform circuit evaluations using SPICE.Analog circuit design tools largely failed in their declared goal, to take over circuit optimization tasks from human designers mainly due to over simplications using custom-developed equations for evaluating circuit performance. Since it is more and more difficult to accurately capture transistor behavior with each new generation of silicon technology, a more practical approach to analog design automation is to keep human engineers at the center of the design flow by providing them with as much needed decision-supporting data as quickly as possible. Mapping the trade-off landscape of a topology with respect to design specifications, for example, can save designers trial and error time. This approach to analog design automation requires less accuracy from the simulation sign-off tools, such as SPICE. However, it demands much faster response for circuit performance evaluations with sufficient accuracy.In this paper, a new solution to both calculation overheads and model complexity is proposed. The proposed fast evaluation method uses a novel look-up table (LUT) algorithm to extract circuit information from complex physics-based transistor models used by SPICE. The model makes use of contemporary memory space, by replacing equations with look-up tables in addition to advanced interpolation methods. The achieved improvement is over 100× throughput and complete decoupling from physical phenomena compared to SPICE run-time, in exchange for few gigabytes of data per device. Examples are shown for the effectiveness of replacing SPICE with our model in a transistor sizing flow, while keeping 99% of the samples inside the 5% error range on 180 nm and 40 nm CMOS processes. The proposed solution is not intended to replace sign-off quality tools, such as SPICE. Rather, it is intended to be used as a fast performance evaluator in analog design automation flows.     

基于神经网络的逻辑门NBTI退化建模与计算

提出了基于神经网络的逻辑门退化延迟模型。根据逻辑门延迟数据特征,采用神经网络BP算法,对仿真样本数据进行训练,获得7种基本逻辑门延迟退化计算方法以及网络模型参数。基于45 nm CMOS工艺进行验证,模型计算值与Spice仿真数据的误差不超过5%。在此基础上,提出NBTI效应下的电路路径延迟退化计算流程,并编写计算程序,对基本逻辑门构成的任意组合逻辑电路(ISCAS85)进行NBTI退化分析,获得路径时序的NBTI退化量。采用该模型,可在电路设计阶段预测电路时序,为高性能、高可靠性数字集成电路的设计提供重要依据。     

基于40nm CMOS工艺电路的NBTI退化表征方法

负偏压温度不稳定性(NBTI)退化是制约纳米级集成电路性能及寿命的主导因素之一,基于40 nm CMOS工艺对NBTI模型、模型提参及可靠性仿真展开研究。首先对不同应力条件下PMOS晶体管NBTI退化特性进行测试、建模及模型参数提取,然后建立了基于NBTI效应的VerilogA等效受控电压源,并嵌入Spectre^TM仿真库中,并将此受控电压源引入反相器及环形振荡器模块电路中进行可靠性仿真分析,可有效反映NBTI退化对电路性能的影响。提出了一套完整可行的电路NBTI可靠性预测方法,包括NBTI模型、模型参数提取、VerilogA可靠性模型描述以及电路级可靠性仿真分析,可为纳米级高性能、高可靠性集成电路设计提供有效参考。