NBTI and power reduction using an input vector control and supply voltage assignment method (Q1657059)

Summary: As technology scales, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) becomes one of the primary failure mechanisms for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits. Meanwhile, the leakage power increases dramatically as the supply/threshold voltage continues to scale down. These two issues pose severe reliability problems for complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices. Because both the NBTI and leakage are dependent on the input vector of the circuit, we present an input vector control (IVC) method based on a linear programming algorithm, which can co-optimize circuit aging and power dissipation simultaneously. In addition, our proposed IVC method is combined with the supply voltage assignment technique to further reduce delay degradation and leakage power. Experimental results on various circuits show the effectiveness of the proposed combination method.