MAUI: Making aging useful, intentionally

Kai-Chiang Wu, Tien-Hung Tseng, Shou-Chun Li

Abstract: Device aging, which causes significant loss on circuit performance and lifetime, has been a primary factor in reliability degradation of nanoscale designs. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of aging-induced clock skews (i.e., make them useful for aging tolerance) by manipulating these time-varying skews to compensate for the performance degradation of logic networks. The goal is to assign achievable/reasonable aging-induced clock skews in a circuit, such that its overall performance degradation due to aging can be minimized, that is, the lifespan can be maximized. On average, 25% aging tolerance can be achieved with insignificant design overhead.