Temporal Performance Degradation under RTN: Evaluation and Mitigation for Nanoscale Circuits

Abstract

Random telegraph noise (RTN) is one of the critical reliability concerns in nanoscale circuit design, and it is important to consider the impact of RTN on the circuits' temporal performance. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate the RTN-induced performance degradation and variation of digital circuits, and the evaluation results show that RTN can result in 54.4% degradation and 59.9% variation on the circuit delay at 16nm technology node. Power supply tuning and gate sizing techniques are investigated to demonstrate the impact of such circuit-level techniques on mitigating the RTN effect.