A scalable technique to identify true critical paths in sequential circuits

Abstract

The recent advancements in the implementation technologies have brought to the front a wide spectrum of new defect types and reliability phenomena. The conventional design techniques do not cope with the integration capacity and stringent requirements of today's nanometer technology nodes. Timing-critical paths analysis is one of such tasks. It has applications in gate-level reliability analysis, e.g., Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) induced aging, but also several others. In this paper, we propose a scalable simulation based technique for explicit identification of true timing-critical paths in both combinational and sequential circuits to enable reliability mitigation approaches, like deciding the paths for delay monitor insertion, resizing delay critical gates or applying rejuvenation stimuli. The paper demonstrates an efficient application of the proposed technique to gate-level NBTI-critical paths identification. The experimental results prove feasibility and scalability of the technique.