The Research On Online Detection Technology Of Aging And Soft Error For Digital Integrated Circuit

Along with the continuous downscaling of technology dimensions forsemiconductors on digital ICs (integrated circuits), as well as the ceaselessincrement of circuit operating frequency and the circuit integration, ICs arebecoming more and more sensitive to aging and soft errors, which could lead to aseries of reliability problems, especially in some high technology fields, such aselectronic communication, military, aviation, aerospace and so on. How to detectthe problems mentioned above as well as prevent them from reducing the circuitperformance or causing circuit failures have become the most important things fordesigners. Considering improving the circuit reliability as the breakthrough point,in the dissertation, aging and soft error online detection technology has beenstudied, the main work are shown as follows:To begin with, the concepts of aging and soft error are studied, as well as theresearch achievements in recent years. The generation principles of aging and softerror are introduced in detail, the existing solutions are classified, and theadvantages and disadvantages of each method are analyzed and compared.What’s more, according to the accumulated effect of aging, a novel integratedsensor with configurable delay element and aging-tolerate ability for circuit failureprediction is proposed. In order to improve the detection rate and solve the questionthat the guard band of the former design is not easy to control, in this dissertation,delay element’s delay which finally forms the guard band interval can be adjustedfor different aging degrees. In addition, feedback circuit in the design can fulfilllatch function perfectly. Thus, this design’s overheads are significantly small bycomparing with the classical structure. Its area optimization rate is about20.6%onthe average and it reduces the power by about36%. Results from the Hspicesimulation illustrate the superiority of this work.Finally, as aging and soft error can be translated into “Stability Violation”, alow-power stability checker design for multiple faults detection is described, whichcan predict the circuit aging failure as well as detect soft error. This design hasresolved questions that the former detection structures can only handle singlefailure or has excessive power dissipation problem, furthermore, our design can also resist aging. Due to these reasons, the detection result of our design is morecomprehensive and accurate. Simulations results with Hspice show that this designhas a good detection ability and also has a good flexibility for temperature andvoltage changing, meanwhile, it reduces the power consumption almost26.9%bycompared with the classical one, moreover, it saves the area overhead of classicalstructure by about31.48%on the average, which can achieve a goodarea-power-performance tradeoff.