The design and development of reliable electronic systems is a highly challenging task. In this paper we present the results of research carried out in order to improve the reliability of the printed circuit boards of a high reliability electronic consumer product manufactured locally by the application of accelerated life testing and interconnect stress testing. Reliability improvement is a ma...

We present a high-performance circuit style that mitigates transient noise such as logic soft errors. Two most significant contributions of this work are: (1) a new design paradigm that addresses the tradeoff between performance and reliability by balancing the design of high-speed combinational logic circuit and that of transient-tolerant sequential element, and (2) a new testing scheme that e...

The MOS switch with bootstrapped technique is widely used in low-voltage switched-capacitor circuit. The switched-capacitor circuit with the bootstrapped technique could be a dangerous design approach in the nano-scale CMOS process due to the gate-oxide transient overstress. The impact of gate-oxide transient overstress on MOS switch in switchedcapacitor circuit is investigated in this work wit...

Front-end-of-line reliability issues such as Bias Temperature Instability (BTI), Hot Carrier Injection (HCI), and Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) have become more prevalent as electrical fields continue to increase in scaled devices. The rapid introduction of process improvements, such as high-k/metal gate stacks and strained silicon, has lead to new reliability issues including BTI ...

Hot-carrier (HC) degradation and negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) of MOS devices are the two most important reliability concerns for deep submicron (DSM) designs. HC degradation occurs when the channel electrons are accelerated in the high electric field near the drain of the MOS device and create interface states, electron traps, or hole traps in the gate oxide near the drain. LDD ...

Higher levels of integration have led to a generation of integrated circuits for which power dissipation and reliability are major design concerns. In CMOS circuits, both of these problems are directly related to the extent of circuit switching activity. The average number of transitions per second at a circuit node is a measure of switching activity that has been called the transition density....