Reliability/wearout-aware design

Abstract

Reliability and wearout phenomena are becoming first order design constraints in modern ICs. Ignoring wearout at design time can lead to costly early failures in the field, provisioning for wearout through increased margins can lead to overdesign. This presentation will go over several methods that try to: (1) accurately model wearout in order to predict and optimize margin provisioning (2) track wearout and signal imminent failure (3) track wearout and provide closed loop adaptation and (4) even take advantage of wearout in a few special cases.