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Papers Published
- Tenentes, V; Rossi, D; Khursheed, S; Al-Hashimi, BM; Chakrabarty, K, Leakage current analysis for diagnosis of bridge defects in power-gating designs,
Ieee Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 37 no. 4
(April, 2018),
pp. 883-895, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) [doi] .
(last updated on 2022/12/30)Abstract:
Manufacturing defects that do not affect the functional operation of low power integrated circuits (ICs) can nevertheless impact their power saving capability. We show that stuck-ON faults on the power switches and resistive bridges between the power networks can impair the power saving capability of power-gating designs. For quantifying the impact of such faults on the power savings of power-gating designs, we propose a diagnosis technique that targets bridges between the power networks. The proposed technique is based on the static power analysis of a power-gating design in stand-by mode and it utilizes a novel on-chip signature generation unit, which is sensitive to the voltage level between power rails, the measurements of which are processed off-line for the diagnosis of bridges that can adversely affect power savings. We explore, through SPICE simulation of the largest IWLS'05 benchmarks synthesized using a 32 nm CMOS technology, the tradeoffs achieved by the proposed technique between diagnosis accuracy and area cost and we evaluate its robustness against process variation. The proposed technique achieves a diagnosis resolution that is higher than 98.6% and 97.9% for bridges of R 10 M (weak bridges) and bridges of R 10 M (strong bridges), respectively, and a diagnosis accuracy higher than 94.5% for all the examined defects. The area overhead is small and scalable: it is found to be 1.8% and 0.3% for designs with 27 K and 157 K gate equivalents, respectively.