Impact of Adaptive Voltage Scaling on Aging-Aware Signoff

Transistor aging due to bias temperature instability (BTI) is a major reliability concern in sub-32nm technology. Aging decreases performance of digital circuits over the entire IC lifetime. To compensate for aging, designs now typically apply adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) to mitigate performance degradation by elevating supply voltage. Varying the supply voltage of a circuit using AVS also causes the BTI degradation to vary over lifetime. This presents a new challenge for margin reduction in conventional signoff methodology, which characterizes timing libraries based on transistor models with pre-calculated BTI degradations for a given IC lifetime. Many works have separately addressed predictive models of BTI and the analysis of AVS, but there is no published work that considers BTI-aware signoff that accounts for the use of AVS during IC lifetime. This motivates us to study how the presence of AVS should affect aging-aware signoff. In this paper, we first simulate and analyze circuit performance degradation due to BTI in the presence of AVS. Based on our observations, we propose a rule-of-thumb for chip designers to characterize an aging-derated standard-cell timing library that accounts for the impact of AVS. According to our experimental results, this aging-aware signoff approach avoids both overestimation and underestimation of aging - either of which results in power or area penalty - in AVS enabled systems.