IC Aging Predicting Using Leakage Change of Critical Paths

Negative bias temperature instability(NBTI) has become a serious concern for the lifetime reliability of integrated circuits. In this paper, we propose to use the isolated leakage change in critical paths from full-chip leakage measurement result to predict NBTI-induced circuit aging. The chip-level leakage change under a set of measurement vectors are firstly formulated as an equation set. Solving this equation set can obtain leakage change in the gates along the critical paths. Then, we predict delay degradation on arbitrary critical path based on the relationship between leakage change and delay increase. Experimental results demonstrated that our scheme can effectively predict NBTI-induced circuit aging with acceptable accuracy loss. The accuracy loss induced by process variation can be avoided through increasing measurement time.