Estimating Circuit Aging Due to BTI and HCI Using Ring-Oscillator-Based Sensors

The performance of nanometer-scale circuits is adversely affected by aging induced by bias temperature instability (BTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI). Both BTI and HCI impact transistor electrical parameters at a level that depends on the operating environment and usage of the circuit. This paper presents a novel method, using on-chip sensors based on ring oscillators (ROSCs), to detect the delay shifts in circuits as a result of aging. Our method uses presilicon analysis of the circuit to compute calibration factors that can translate BTI- and HCI-induced delay shifts in the ROSC to those in the circuit of interest. Our simulations show that the delay estimates are within 1% of the true values from presilicon analysis. Further, for post-silicon analysis, a refinement strategy is proposed where sensor measurements can be amalgamated with infrequent online delay measurements on the monitored circuit to partially capture its true workloads. This leads to about 8% lower delay guardbanding overheads compared to the conventional methods as demonstrated using benchmark circuits.