Research On Aging Online Prediction And Detection Technology Of Integrated Circuits

With the rapid development of semiconductor technology, the integration of integrated circuits is becoming larger and larger, so its reliability is facing great challenges. In order to ensure the normal operation in the service cycle, the aging effect of integrated circuits becomes the key problem of reliability. The aging effect of integrated circuit will increase the delay of combinational circuit, cause the timing error,and finally lead to the failure of the circuit function. Therefore, in order to solve the problem of timing error caused by the aging of the integrated circuit, it is necessary to find an effective method to solve the problem. Based on this, the thesis mainly studies on the aging online test technology of integrated circuit.This thesis first introduces the mechanism of integrated circuit aging effect, timing constraints of synchronous sequential circuits, and explains the connections between them, which clearly illustrates how the aging of integrated circuit causes timing errors and it’s the key issue of this thesis. Then, the thesis introduces two kinds of effective methods based on this problem: integrated circuit aging online prediction and detection technology of integrated circuit. At the end of this thesis, the testing methods and the testing unit are introduced in detail in the two techniques.Based on the prediction technique, this thesis presents a design of a stability detector for tolerating dynamic frequency variations. Clock generator generates new monitoring interval by system clock and then new stability detector design can transform combinational circuit violation into detection pulses. Finally the warning signal is given by collecting pulse detection. The simulation results show that this method can tolerate variations in clock frequency, have certain advantages in area overhead, and transform two original floating nodes into one node. Therefore, this method can improve the detection capability of the whole detector.Combined with two kinds of test techniques, a method of timing error detection and self-recovery based on pre-sampling is proposed. Firstly, an interval of pre-sampling and another interval of detection between the effective clock edges were generated by system clock. Secondly, the input signal was captured earlier in the interval of pre-sampling. Finally, the timing error was detected in the interval of detection, and if the detection circuit sent out warning signal, it would achieve self-correction. The result of simulation shows that, its speed is significantly improved by 3.6 times on average compared with other structures of detection. Meanwhile, the design achieves self-correction and self-recovery without adjustments of timing sequence, so it doesn’t reduce the performance of circuits.The two methods proposed in this thesis can be used to detect timing errors caused by the aging of integrated circuits. It has certain value to solve the reliability problem of integrated circuit.