On-Chip Ageing Monitoring and System Adaptation

Process, voltage, temperature and ageing variations have become important issues in nanometre technology nodes, and thus on-chip accurate reliability and performance monitors have become necessary for adaptive compensation schemes. This chapter presents up-to-date state-of-the-art performance and reliability monitors, insertion methodology and experimental results of different monitors used for process and environment variations as well as ageing compensation. Voltage and frequency scaling techniques are combined with monitors to ensure fault-free operation. Measurements and simulations were performed on large sample sets for varied range of process, voltages, temperatures and ageing to argument on the choice of paths to be monitored and to illustrate adaptive compensation techniques.