Timing Reliability Improvement of Master-Slave Flip-Flops in the Presence of Aging Effects

Jafari, Atousa; Raji, Mohsen; Ghavami, Behnam

doi:10.1109/tcsi.2020.3024601

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 44 publications

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“…Interestingly, the assumption of a perfect en signal has rarely been questioned in past investigations of latch and flip flop. Although signal transitions in the GHz clock regime are far from ideal, the clock signal was completely neglected in various studies focused, for example, on the impact of process variations [7], [8], [9] or aging effects [10]. Nevertheless, there are also exceptions: Larsson and Svensson [11], Alioto et al [12], and Pandey et al [13] investigated the delay variations of flip flops due to differing clock slopes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hidden Behavior of a D-Latch

Maier

Steininger

Najvirt

2023

IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I

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For clock and data transitions in close temporal proximity, synchronous memory elements potentially enter metastability, which leads to unintended output behavior. Although respective analyses in literature have already derived suitable explanations, almost all of them modeled the control (clock) signal transition with negligible rise/fall time. In modern circuits this assumption is, however, not reasonable any more. In fact, due to a finite slope, intermediate clock signal values have to be considered during a large share of the storage process, while their concrete impact is not yet sufficiently explored. In this paper we thus use static and dynamic considerations to thoroughly investigate the behavior of a latch for arbitrary analog control, data and output values, i.e., during the storage process. Basic circuit considerations allow us to derive a unified model which identifies the latch as a Schmitt Trigger with vastly varying hysteresis. We verify the correctness of our predictions by comparison to analog SPICE simulations. Finally we are able to generalize our findings and thus provide explanations for yet unexplained behavior reported in literature.

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