Reliability Issues And Design Solutions In Advanced Cmos Design

Author : Ricardo Gomez gomez
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (122 download)

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Download or read book Design of Innovative Solutions to Improve the Variability and Reliability of CMOS Circuits on Thin Film Technologies written by Ricardo Gomez gomez and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The increased sensitivity to Process, Voltage, Temperature, and Aging (PVTA) variations in scaled integrated circuits' technology nodes is responsible for a significant degradation in the products' specifications during high volume manufacturing. This has become a growing concern in digital circuit design, which has to cope with the increasingly stringent requirements of modern applications in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, and safety. In this thesis work, embedded timing monitoring and compensation techniques are explored to efficiently address these conflicting requirements. The proposed techniques are studied separately and then combined in 3 digital SoC demonstrators manufactured in 28nm FD-SOI CMOS technology, one of which has been measured at the time of this manuscript's writing.Embedded timing monitoring is proposed as a design solution to enable PVTA compensation, in-field safety monitoring and security protection against hardware timing attacks. The state-of-the-art timing monitors are evaluated from the perspective of an integration into industrial products, emphasizing features such as high reusability and low integration costs. The identified advantages of register-to-register timing monitoring have led to the implementation of a 3mV/bit tunable replica circuit in 28nm FD-SOI CMOS, which demonstrates a fast and accurate PVTA tracking of an ARM Cortex-R4F based SoC across slow/typical/fast process, 0.5/1.2V, -40/150oC, and End Of Life (EOL) aging. Finally, this work proposes a novel timing monitor that overcomes the weaknesses of existing solutions, simultaneously achieving the high reusability and wide monitoring range of ring oscillators and the fast and accurate timing acquisition of tunable replica circuits.The exploration of adaptive and compensation techniques begins with the determination of their application scope in industrial designs: the improvement of the worst-case limiting corners that set the product's specifications during high volume manufacturing. Following this perspective, the optimal region of application of voltage scaling and body biasing techniques has been determined and their impact on the worst-case specifications of digital SoCs has been assessed. Finally, this work demonstrates how the power overhead induced by the separate application of voltage scaling or body biasing can be mitigated through the combination of both, specially in circuits with a variety of Operational Performance Points (OPPs).The benefits of the proposed techniques have been demonstrated in a digital SoC that optimizes its energy across 11X frequency-wide OPPs by combining adaptive voltage scaling, adaptive body biasing, and bias-in-memory-array with a tunable replica circuit for safety, embedded power regulation and compensation. Through the application of these techniques the proposed design overcomes previously reported limitations and demonstrates an improvement by 21X performance, 120mV lower Vmin, and 8X lifetime, the low-power, mid-, and high-performance OPPs respectively.The studies reported here have been included in several chapters of a scientific book to be published this year. Furthermore, they have contributed to a new technology and design platform. Finally, 3 IEEE conference publications and 3 patent applications have resulted from this thesis' work.