Design automation towards reliable analog integrated circuits

Abstract

Reliability is becoming one of the major concerns in designing integrated circuits in nanometer CMOS technologies. Problems related to degradation mechanisms like NBTI or soft breakdown, as well as increased external interference such as caused by crosstalk and EMI, cause timedependent circuit performance degradation. Variability only makes these things more severe. This creates a need for innovative design techniques and design tools that help designers coping with these reliability and variability problems. This tutorial paper gives a brief description of design tools for the efficient analysis and identification of reliability problems in analog circuits, as a first step towards the automated design of guaranteed reliable analog circuits.