System-level modeling and reliability analysis of microprocessor systems

Abstract

I am particularly thankful to my parents, Lo-Wen Chen and Shu-Yuan Tang, who have always been on my side, for their love and encouragement throughout my life. I also thank my grandfather, grandmothers, brother, Hsuan-Chih Chen, and sister, Jou-Chou Chen, for their love and support. Last but not least, I would like to thank all the professors, teachers, families, and friends who guided me to become the person that I am today.v

Comprehensive reliability and aging analysis on SRAMs within microprocessor systems

“…Running RTL or SPICE simulations of a complete microprocessor to extract the activity profile of each net is not feasible in most cases, since it may take a few months to finish simulating a single benchmark. On the other hand, simulating microprocessors with standard benchmarks on an FPGA (the Xilinx Virtex-5) takes only a few minutes [21,22]. Our framework for extracting the activity/thermal profiles is schematically described in Fig.…”

MBIST and statistical hypothesis test for time dependent dielectric breakdowns due to GOBD vs. BTDDB in an SRAM array

“…Gate oxide breakdown (GOBD) is modeled as a leakage current which flows through the gate oxide in an SRAM cell [3]. Although the leakage path appears between the gate and substrate, the gate-to-substrate leakage is usually neglected since it has a little effect on performance [1].…”

“…However, there is no study that separates GOBD and BTDDB, both of which create leakage paths in the SRAM cell. GOBD is modeled as a leakage path through the gate oxide of transistors [3] and BTDDB is modeled as a resistive bridge between unconnected metals in the same layer [2]. Some of the resistive short locations in an SRAM cell overlap, and hence these faults result in exactly the same failure signature.…”

“…First, our BIST system detects resistive short defects due to GOBD and BTDDB in an SRAM cell. The lifetime and failure rates for GOBD and BTDDB depend on geometric components and system activity [3]. These geometric components and activities vary significantly in a cell.…”

“…The characteristic lifetimes, , , , of resistive short defects due to GOBD and BTDDB are computed with the reliability simulator [4][5] for all possible wearout sites induced by GOBD and BTDDB in the embedded SRAM system.The characteristic lifetimes of each mechanism are determined by solving for , with[3]:1…”