Reliability and Circuit Timing Analysis with HCI and NBTI

Abstract

One of the key challenges in the electronic industries is the need to detect aged or recycled integrated circuits (ICs) before they enter into their production line. The use of aged or recycled ICs may lead to degradation in the quality, performance and reliability of electronic products. The performance of these ICs is adversely affected by aging induced by reliability issues such as bias temperature instability (BTI) and hot-carrier injection (HCI) effects. Both BTI and HCI affect transistor electrical parameters depending on operating environment and time of usage of ICs. In this paper, the frequency shift in ring oscillator and delay variation in adder output due to aging is analyzed with BTI and HCI using Cadence ReIXpert tool.