Process and reliability sensors for Nanoscale CMOS

John P. Keane, Chris H. Kim, Qunzeng Liu, Sachin S Sapatnekar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Some case studies describing the design of sensors to detect on-chip variations are studied. These sensors are designed to capture time-varying performance shifts due to aging phenomena based on ring oscillators (ROSC). A new class of on-chip reliability monitors called odometer has been demonstrated in silicon, targeted for a range of applications such as reliability characterization during process ramp up, chip lifetime projection, in-field product data collection, and real-time aging compensation. During the short measurement periods in odometer, a phase comparator uses a fresh reference ROSC to sample the output of an identical stressed ROSC. ROSCs can be either put into stress mode or kept fresh by switching the local power supply using power gates. A counter is used to measure the beat frequency by counting the number of reference ROSC periods during one period of the phase comparator output signal.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number6266774
Pages (from-to)8-17
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Design and Test of Computers
Volume29
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012

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