FLAW: FPGA lifetime awareness

ABSTRACT

Aggressive scaling of technology has an adverse impact on the reliability of VLSI circuits. Apart from increasing transient error susceptibility, the circuits also become more vulnerable to permanent damage and failures due to different physical phenomenon. Such concerns have been recently demonstrated for regular micro-architectures. In this work we demonstrate the vulnerability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)s to two different types of hard errors, namely, Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) and Electro-migration. We also analyze the performance degradation of FPGAs over time caused by Hot Carrier Effects (HCE). We also propose three novel techniques to counter such aging based failures and increase the lifetime of the device.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.1 Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Reliability

Keywords:
FPGA, electromigration, hot carrier effects, time dependent dielecric breakdown