A novel BIST scheme for circuit aging measurement of aerospace chips

Abstract The avionics working environment is bad, easy to accelerate aging of circuits. Circuit aging is one of the important factors that influence the reliability of avionics, so circuit aging testing is of great significance to improve the reliability of avionics. As continuing aging would degrade circuit performance, aging can be monitored through precise measurement of performance degradation. However, previous methods for predicting circuit performance have limited prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Built-In Self-Test (BIST) scheme for circuit aging measurement, which constructs self-oscillation loops employing parts of critical paths and activates oscillations by specific test patterns. An aging signature counter is then used to capture the oscillation frequency and in turn measure the aging state of the circuit. We propose to implement this measurement process by BIST. Experimental results show that the proposed in-field aging measurement is robust with respect to process variations and can achieve a precision of about 90%. The application of this scheme has a certain value to improve the reliability of avionics systems.

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