This paper describes two major reliability mechanisms: hot-carrier instability (HCI) and negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI). The reliability performance of a typical operational amplifier is shown and analysed. Results show that the circuit performance might improve as transistors degrade. Failure analysis on the mismatch is presented for the first time. Design and optimization issues are discussed taking the reliability into consideration, which forms a goal programming problem with several methods proposed to solve this.
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