NBTI Mitigation by Giving Random Scan-in Vectors during Standby Mode

Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is one of the serious concerns for circuit performance degradation. NBTI degrades PMOS transistors under negative bias, whereas without negative bias they recovers. In this paper, we propose a mitigation method for NBTIinduced performance degradation that exploits the recovery property by shifting random input sequence through scan paths. With this method, we prevent consecutive stress that causes large degradation. Experimental results reveal that random scan-in vectors successfully mitigate NBTI and the path delay degradation is reduced by 71% in a test case when standby mode occupies 10% of total time.

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