Robustness measurement of integrated circuits and its adaptation to aging effects

• Accurate simulation based prediction model for robustness of integrated circuits.
• Probability based robustness measurement introduced.
• Aging effects as well as distributions in operating conditions incorporated.
• Broad applicability demonstrated by adaptations to digital and analog circuits.

Even though nearly everybody has an intuitive understanding of what robustness means and even though the demands on system durability and its immunity against perturbation are getting increasingly important, there is no proper way how to measure robustness of integrated circuits already during the design phase. We therefore present a robustness model and methods of how to measure this quality. The methods can be directly integrated in today’s partially automated design flows. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our model by different use cases including degradation of digital circuits due to aging effects and the analysis of analog/mixed-signal circuits.