The reliability of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits has become increasingly\nsusceptible to transient faults induced by environmental noise with the scaling of technology. Some\ncommonly used fault tolerance strategies require statistical methods to accurately estimate the fault\nrate in different parts of the logic circuit, and Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is often applied to\ncomplete this task. However, the MC method suffers from impractical computation costs due to the\nsize of the circuits. Furthermore, circuit aging effects, such as negative bias temperature instability\n(NBTI), will change the characteristics of the circuit during its lifetime, leading to a change in the\ncircuit�s noise margin. This change will increase the complexity of transient fault rate estimation\ntasks. In this paper, an NBTI-aware statistical analysis method based on probability voltage transfer\ncharacteristics is proposed for combinational logic circuit. This method can acquire accurate fault rates\nusing a discrete probability density function approximation process, thus resolving the computation\ncost problem of the MC method. The proposed method can also consider aging effects and analyze\nstatistical changes in the fault rates. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the MC\nsimulation, our method can achieve computation times that are two orders of magnitude shorter\nwhile maintaining an error rate less than 9%.
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