Design of a Low Power Self-tuning Digital System Considering Aging Effects

It has become ever harder to design reliable circuits with each nanometer technology node; under normal operation conditions, a transistor device can be affected by various aging effects resulting in performance degradation and eventually design failure. The reliability (aging) effect has traditionally been the area of process engineers. However, in the future, even the smallest of variations can slow down a transistor's switching speed, and an aging device may not perform adequately at a very low voltage. Therefore, circuit designers need to consider these reliability effects in the early stages of design to make sure there are enough margins for circuits to function correctly over their entire lifetime. However, such an approach excessively increases the size and power dissipation of a system. As the impact of reliability, new techniques in designing aging-resilient circuits are necessary to reduce the impact of the aging stresses on performance, power, and yield or to predict the failure of a system. Therefore, in this paper, a novel low power on-chip self-tuning circuit considering the aging effects has been proposed.

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