A Fully Standard-Cell Based On-Chip BTI and HCI Monitor with 6.2x BTI sensitivity and 3.6x HCI sensitivity at 7 nm Fin-FET Process

In autonomous driving era, it is inevitable to pursue higher performance for automotive LSIs such as advanced driverassistance systems (ADAS) and so on. This should be achieved under limited power budget at high temperature condition of the car. Therefore, requirement of higher performance and higher energy efficiency are one of the key challenges and motivations to apply cutting-edge process technologies such as 7 nm FinFET process [1] and so on. On the other hand, as process technology is scaled down, device reliability such as bias temperature instability (BTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI) are becoming more important because of decreasing design margin with supply voltage (Vdd) scaling [2]. Moreover, an annual mileage of the car is expected to be increased in autonomous driving era since paradigm shift occurs in terms of the car usage. As a result, reliability design becomes more severe by both process scaling and car usage change. In general, LSI designers take guard-band (GB) into account for aging such as BTI and HCI to prevent delay failures at the end of the products lifetime. Therefore, the aging monitor system, which is easy to implement in products with features of high sensitivity and NBTI/PBTI/HCI separations, could be a solution to optimize required GB and detect outlier o f aging at testing [3,5].

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