I-CORPS: A Tooolset for Lifetime Evaluation of Circuits and Systems

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Electronic circuits degrade during operation. Eventually, the degradation is so large that it causes the circuits to no longer function properly. Customers of electronic devices expect a 10 year lifetime. Manufacturers currently check lifetime using manufactured samples of prototype circuits. Failures of lifetime tests are very costly and entail additional re-design engineering costs and the cost of re-fabrication (hundreds of thousands of dollars). This project will develop software to estimate the lifetime of electronic devices. The toolset that will be developed will check if a design can meet lifetime requirements prior to the manufacturing of prototypes and will provide guidance on the components of a design that need to be fixed so as to improve the lifetime of the full system. The project will develop software to enable semiconductor design companies to improve the lifetime of their products and to detect the components of a design that can limit the products' lifetime. This will be done with simulation tools that estimate the lifetime distributions of circuits while taking into account a wide variety of wearout mechanisms and operating conditions. The software will compute activity and temperature profiles of full systems. These are linked to the physical layout and transistor models to compute feature/transistor-level wearout statistics. The feature/transistor-level wearout statistics are combined to identify vulnerable blocks/components and to estimate the lifetime distribution of the full electronic system. The team will conduct customer dicovery to gain further insights further insights into the problem and to validate the proposed hypotheses.