Jane W. Sowards

Design-in reliability for over drive applications in advanced technology

We present the FEOL reliability checking flow in advanced technology especially with over drive applications. We check gate bias values obtained from SPICE transient simulation against the maximum allowed value, Vg_max, to make sure robust gate dielectric reliability. We set up HSPICE MOSRA simulation procedure to let designers check the impact of BTI and HCI to each MOSFET device and the circuit performance at End-of-Lifetime (EOL). From HCI degradation analysis from HSPICE MOSRA, we obtained a good correlation between HCI damage and slew rate and conditions in which HCI degradation is negligible. We discuss on the selection of the stress conditions and monitor conditions to be checked. We applied HSPICE MOSRA to several over drive applications and were able to successfully justify them with careful modeling for HCI and NCHC in addition to BTI.