An Aging Fault Prediction Sensor Circuit Based Guardband Violation

Abstract

With the continuous development of integrated circuits, the aging failure caused by the negative temperature instability will lead to delay degradation of MOSFET and thus lead to timing fault. So it will result in circuit failure in the end. In this paper, we design a kind of aging prediction sensor circuit. By judging whether the input signal jumps within allowance windows, it can send out the ‘flag’ signal before fault occurs. To verify the effectiveness of the prediction circuit, we made a design of digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) circuit to implement the hardware test. Meanwhile, we build up a hardware experiment platform to perform the aging failure experiment of the circuit, and the platform consists of the Zigbee wireless data transmission module to transmit the test data, and the serial debugging tool to receive the data sent by Zigbee coordinator. The experimental results show that the aging sensor can send out the ‘flag’ signal correctly before the DPLL circuit occurs aging fault.