Circuit and System Level Tools for Thermal-Aware Reliability Assessments of IC Designs Project

Integrated circuits are often designed using simple and conservative 'design rules' to ensure that the resulting circuits will meet reliability goals. This simplicity and conservatism leads to reduced performance for a given circuit and metallization technology. To address this problem, we had developed a TCAD tool, ERNI, which allows process-sensitive and layout-specific reliability estimates for fully laid out or partially laid out integrated circuits (Y. Chery, S. Hau-Riege) (see figure 1).

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