Timing Slack Monitoring for Reliability Diagnosis

Abstract:
For safety critical applications such as aeronautic, automotive and medical, reliability is a crucial design goal. Reliability of digital circuits can be monitored by measuring the timing of the circuit, which enables dynamic compensation to process, voltage, temperature and aging (PVTA) variations and prolongs the lifetime of the circuits. In our approach, the remaining slack of the digital circuit is monitored by in-situ delay monitors. This paper proposes an accurate, aging persistent monitoring system and discusses the design and implementation of the required circuitry. Additionally, customizable manipulation of the monitor data, utilizing a pre-processing unit, accurately predicts upcoming failures in the near future.