Aging-Aware Timing Analysis and Optimization Considering Path Sensitization

Device aging, which causes significant loss on circuit performance and lifetime, has been a main factor in reliability degradation of nanoscale designs. Aggressive technology scaling trends, such as thinner gate oxide without proportional downscaling of supply voltage, necessitate an aging-aware analysis and optimization flow during early design stages. Since only a small portion of critical and near-critical paths can be sensitized and may determine the circuit delay under aging, path sensitization should also be explicitly addressed for more accurate and efficient optimization. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of path sensitization on aging-aware timing analysis and then present a novel framework for aging-aware timing optimization considering path sensitization. By extracting and manipulating critical sub-circuits accounting for the effective circuit delay, our proposed framework can reduce aging-induced performance degradation to only 1.21% or one-seventh of the original performance loss with less than 2% area overhead.