Publication
HotAging - Impact of Power Dissipation on Hardware Degradation
Frank Sill Torres; Alberto Garcia Ortiz; Rolf Drechsler
In: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS-2019), May 26-29, Sapporo, Japan, 2019.
Abstract
Safety and dependability are of utmost importancefor many integrated systems. Hence, it must be guaranteedthroughout the whole system’s lifetime that no ambient andinternal influences can affect the system’s integrity. Under thisscope and having in mind the side-effects of today’s nanoscaletechnologies, hardware degradation is of rising concern. However,related studies should not solely focus on aging effect itself, butalso consider its relation to any accelerating factors, especiallytemperature. Towards this end, this work presents a study on howthe power dissipation of a circuit, and thus, its temperature, canexpedite wear-out effects. Therefore, three different analysis areperformed—aging without and with consideration of temperatureand the study on how guard-banding strategies are affected.In order to distinguish random and, maliciously intended oraccidentally produced, worst case scenarios, we implementedan algorithm that determines a combination of input vectorsthat forces high aging states and high power dissipation. Resultsindicate that aging under consideration of temperature canincrease circuit delay by more than 26% (random case) and bynearly 40% (worst case). That means, if a maximum acceptabledelay degradation is defined, designs can enter malfunction statesalready in a period of weeks (worst case) or months (randomcase). These results underline the importance of consideringpower dissipation, and thus temperature, when doing aginganalysis and aging verification.