Improved Reliability Analysis Tool (ReAl) for lifetime analysis of CMOS circuits

Abstract

The reliability issues like Negative Bias Temperature Instability and Hot Carrier Injection are major concerns in nanoscale design of MOSFET applications. This necessitates that model with higher accuracy for prediction of these degradations and to calculate the lifetime of the CMOS application circuits. Earlier models available in literature are reported to be accurate but the huge time is consumed in evaluating these effects. Hence, we were motivated to propose extended & new models, which evaluate much faster than the available models. We propose a methodology, which uses these models and simulates the circuit degradation due to the effect of NBTI and HCI in CMOS circuit design, and subsequently predicts the lifetime of the circuit. This tool, which we call as Reliability Analysis Tool (ReAl) uses computational support of MATLAB, whereas utilizing accuracy of SPICE simulation for model building, and integrates both in order to provide the lifetime of the CMOS circuit under consideration. Terms -NBTI (Negative Bias Temperature Instability), HCI (Hot Carrier Injection)