Reliability in CMOS-based integrated circuits has always been a critical concern. In today's ultra-scaled technologies, a time-varying kind of variability has raised that, on top of the well-known time-zero variability, threatens to shorten the lifetime of integrated circuits, both analog and digital. Effects like Bias Temperature Instability and Hot Carriers Injection need to be studied, characterized and modeled to include, and, thus, mitigate, their impact in the design of CMOS integrated circuits. This paper presents an array-based integrated circuit whose purpose is precisely that: to observe, quantify and characterize the impact of time-dependent variability effects in a specific kind of circuits: Ring Oscillators.

Talk delivered in International Conference on Synthesis, Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Methods, and Applications to Circuit Design (SMACD) in Lausanne (Switzerland), 15-18 July 2019. © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

This work has been funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad del Gobierno de España with support from ERDF (Projects TEC2016-75151-C3-R, TEC2017-87052-P).

Peer reviewed