BTI Aging Monitoring based on SRAM Start-up Behavior

Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) is one of the dominant CMOS aging mechanisms. It causes time-dependent variation, threatening circuit lifetime reliability. BTI-induced circuit errors are not detectable at the fabrication stage. On-line monitoring schemes are therefore necessary to capture the degradations during the operational time. Traditional aging monitoring techniques exhibit high implementation complexity and low stability. In this paper, we propose a BTI monitoring approach by simply tracking the start-up behavior of SRAM cells. SRAM is a widely used on-chip device in many applications. We study the impact of BTI for SRAM start-up values and age some cells in a manipulated manner. The BTI degradation is evaluated based on the number of SRAM cells starting with a certain value. This technique can be used to estimate the degradation for on-chip logic circuits without introducing additional circuitry, and thus has very low implementation complexity. We use an SRAM array with 1024 cells to estimate the degradations for multiple logic circuits, and show the average mean absolute percentage error as 8.48%. In addition, this technique is robust considering process, voltage and temperature variations.