Temperature-Aware NBTI Modeling Techniques in Digital Circuits

Hong LUO  Yu WANG  Rong LUO  Huazhong YANG  Yuan XIE 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics  Vol.E92-C  No.6  pp.875-886
Publication Date: 2009/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Integrated Electronics
Keyword: 
negative bias temperature instability (NBTI),  temperature,  reliability, 

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Summary: 
Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has become a critical reliability phenomena in advanced CMOS technology. In this paper, we propose an analytical temperature-aware dynamic NBTI model, which can be used in two circuit operation cases: executing tasks with different temperatures, and switching between active and standby mode. A PMOS Vth degradation model and a digital circuits' temporal performance degradation estimation method are developed based on our NBTI model. The simulation results show that: 1) the execution of a low temperature task can decrease ΔVth due to NBTI by 24.5%; 2) switching to standby mode can decrease ΔVth by 52.3%; 3) for ISCAS85 benchmark circuits, the delay degradation can decrease significantly if the circuit execute low temperature task or switch to standby mode; 4) we have also observed the execution time's ratio of different tasks and the ratio of active to standby time both have a considerable impact on NBTI effect.