Self-healing analog/RF circuits

Process variation is the most critical issue for the nanoscale analog and radiofrequency integrated circuits (ICs). There are many traditional techniques to mitigate the process variations problems which are mainly based on some form of static approach. However, as the traditional over-design technique becomes impractical, on-chip self-healing which is a dynamic approach has emerged as a promising methodology to address the variability issue. The key idea of self-healing is to actively monitor the post-manufacturing circuit performance metrics and then adaptively adjust a number of tuning knobs, such as bias voltage, in order to meet the given performance specifications. This chapter discusses the self-healing mechanism based analog and radio-frequency ICs.