Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NI3TI) is considered one of the most critical device reliability concerns in nanometer CMOS technologies, because it causes devices to exhibit a temporal drift of performance over time. In this work, we analyze the effects of this aging mechanism on tree-based Clock Distribution Not works (CDNs). Aging on clock tree can in fact impact the skew, causing a time-dependent failure of the circuit, if the aging conditions in dilferent portions of the clock tree are non-uniform, like it happens in galed-eloek tree in which one portion of the clock tree is selectively disabled to save power. Characterization results collected through an in-house aging simulation framework provide valuable insights on the potential effects of various design parameters such as sizing and fanout of elock buffers and height of clock-trees.
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