Cost reduction of wear-out monitoring by measurement point selection

Early failure rates have increased due to reduced feature dimensions and electromigration wear-out. Periodic delay measurements can be employed to estimate the state of wear-out. Including delay measurement sensors on-chip is costly. Therefore, a method is proposed to reduce the number of measurement points. The method identifies wear-out sensitive interconnects and selects a small number of measurement points to target the identified interconnects. The method is demonstrated on ISCAS85 benchmark