On Predicting Circuit Aging via Considering Actual Workload

Transistor aging has become a prominent factor affecting the reliability of integrated circuits.Based on the physical understanding of aging mechanism,an aging analysis framework is proposed to predict the maximum circuit aging.The analysis framework starts at the worst case prediction,which assumes the extremely operational conditions.Then,under considering the impacts of different workloads and logic topology of the circuit on the aging-induced delay degradation,non-linear optimization is exploited to obtain the worst combination of the duty cycles which may result in the maximum circuit aging.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed circuit aging analysis scheme.