Low Cost NBTI Degradation Detection and Masking Approaches

Performance degradation of integrated circuits due to aging effects, such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI), is becoming a great concern for current and future CMOS technology. In this paper we propose two monitoring and masking approaches that detect late transitions due to NBTI degradation in the combinational part of critical data-paths and guarantee the correctness of the provided output data by adapting the clock frequency. Compared to recently proposed alternative solutions, one of our approaches (denoted as Low Area and Power approach) requires lower area overhead and lower, or comparable, power consumption, while exhibiting the same impact on system performance, while the other proposed approach (denoted as High Performance approach) allows us to reduce the impact on system performance, at the cost of some increase in area and power consumption.