Enhancement of System-Lifetime by Alternating Module Activation

Reliability and robustness have been always important parameters of integrated systems. However, with the emergence of nanotechnologies reliability concerns are arising with an alarming pace. The consequence is an increasing demand of techniques that improve yield as well as lifetime reliability of today’s complex integrated systems. It is requested though, that the solutions result in only minimum penalties on power dissipation and system performance. The approach Alternating Module Activation (AMA) offers both extension of system lifetime and low increase of power and delay. The essential contribution of this work is an analysis to which extent this technique can be improved even more. Thereby, components that enable partial concurrent error detection as well as Built-in self-test functionality are included. Further, a flow for comparison of system’s lifetime on cell-level is presented. Final results indicate an improvement of the system’s lifetime of up to 58 % for designs in which the expected instance lifetime differs by factor 2.