Robustness validation of integrated circuits and systems

Abstract

Robust system design is becoming increas ingly important, because of the ongoing miniaturization of integrated circuits, the increasing effects of aging mecha nisms, and the effects of parasitic elements, both intrin sic and external. For safety reasons, particular emphasis is placed on robust system design in the automotive and aerospace sectors. Until now, the term robustness has been applied very intuitively and there has been no proper way to actually measure robustness. However, the complexity of contemporary systems makes it difficult to fulfill tight specifications. For this reason, robustness must be inte grated into a partially automated design flow. In this pa per, a new approach to robustness modeling is presented, in addition to new ways to quantify or assess the robustness of a design. To demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed approach, it is adapted and applied to several different sce narios. These include the robustness evaluation of digital circuits under aging effects, such as NBTI; the robustness modeling of analog and mixed signal circuits using affine arithmetic; and the robustness study of software algorithms on a high system level.

A Cross-Layer Approach to Measure the Robustness of Integrated Circuits

“…Other possible mapping functions from other fields of application further underlining the cross-layer capabilities of our approach are described in Barke et al [2012Barke et al [ , 2014.…”

“…Such a model, which was initially developed in the research project ROBUST [Radetzki et al 2010], is described in detail in this article. This general cross-layer model can be adapted to any internal or external parasitic effects [Barke et al 2012[Barke et al , 2014]. It can model robustness across all levels of abstraction from transistor to system level, both in the analog and digital domain.…”