Extending Chip Lifetime With Safer Voltage Scaling


What if your chips lived 20% longer without compromising performance, and even while reducing power consumption? How would it affect your product’s reliability and cost? What would be the effect on your profitability? With the demand for longer-lasting chips growing across industries, designers and reliability engineers face increasing pressure to ensure their products perform correctly fo... » read more

Reliability Concerns Shift Left Into Chip Design


Demand for lower defect rates and higher yields is increasing, in part because chips are now being used for safety- and mission-critical applications, and in part because it's a way of offsetting rising design and manufacturing costs. What's changed is the new emphasis on solving these problems in the initial design. In the past, defectivity and yield were considered problems for the fab. Re... » read more

Aging Analysis Common Model Interface Gains Momentum


By Greg Curtis, Ahmed Ramadan, Ninad Pimparkar, and Jung-Suk Goo In February 2019, Siemens EDA wrote an article1 entitled “The Time Is Now for a Common Model Interface”. Since that time, we have continued to see increasing demand for aging analysis, not only in the traditional automotive space, but also in other areas of technology design, such as mobile communication and IoT application... » read more

Dealing With Device Aging At Advanced Nodes


Premature aging of circuits is becoming troublesome at advanced nodes, where it increasingly is complicated by new market demands, more stress from heat, and tighter tolerances due to increased density and thinner dielectrics. In the past, aging and stress largely were separate challenges. Those lines are starting to blur for a number of reasons. Among them: In automotive, advanced-node... » read more

Process Variation And Aging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss design reliability and circuit aging with João Geada, chief technologist for the semiconductor business unit at ANSYS; Hany Elhak, product management director, simulation and characterization in the custom IC and PCB group at Cadence; Christoph Sohrmann, advanced physical verification at Fraunhofer EAS; and Naseer Khan, vice president of sales at M... » read more

Why Chips Die


Semiconductor devices contain hundreds of millions of transistors operating at extreme temperatures and in hostile environments, so it should come as no surprise that many of these devices fail to operate as expected or have a finite lifetime. Some devices never make it out of the lab and many others die in the fab. It is hoped that most devices released into products will survive until they be... » read more

Taming NBTI To Improve Device Reliability


Negative-bias temperature instability is a growing issue at the most advanced process nodes, but it also has proven extremely difficult to tame using conventional approaches. That finally may be starting to change. NBTI is an aging mechanism in field-effect transistors that leads to a change of the characteristic curves of a transistor during operation. The result can be a drift toward unint... » read more

Minimizing Chip Aging Effects


Aging kills semiconductors, and it is a growing problem for an increasing number of semiconductor applications—especially as they migrate to more advanced nodes. Additional analysis and prevention methods are becoming necessary for safety critical applications. While some aspects of aging can be mitigated up front, others are tied to the operation of the device. What can an engineering tea... » read more

Chip Aging Becomes Design Problem


Chip aging is a growing problem at advanced nodes, but so far most design teams have not had to deal with it. That will change significantly as new reliability requirements roll out across markets such as automotive, which require a complete analysis of factors that affect aging. Understanding the underlying physics is critical, because it can lead to unexpected results and vulnerabilities. ... » read more

Transistor Aging Intensifies At 10/7nm And Below


Transistor aging and reliability are becoming much more troublesome for design teams at 10nm and below. Concepts like ‘infant mortality’ and 'bathtub curves' are not new to semiconductor design, but they largely dropped out of sight as methodologies and EDA tools improved. To get past infant mortality, a burn-in process would be done, particularly for memories. And for reliability, which... » read more

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