GLACIER: a hot carrier gate level circuit characterization and simulation system for VLSI design

Abstract

Gate level circuit simulation on hot carrier degradation is introduced for the first time by the GLACIER system presented in this paper. The inherent advantages such as high speed and high capacity of the gate level simulation as compared to the traditional transistor level hot carrier simulation makes the design-in reliability simulation possible and practical for the deep submicron VLSI circuit designs with millions of transistors. By virtue of a unique ratio based modeling technique, GLACIER system provides a very high accuracy which is mostly within 1% difference of transistor level hot carrier simulation.