Evaluation and mitigation of performance degradation under random telegraph noise for digital circuits

摘要

Random telegraph noise (RTN) has become an important reliability issue in nanoscale circuits recently. This study proposes a simulation framework to evaluate the temporal performance of digital circuits under the impact of RTN at 16 nm technology node. Two fast algorithms with linear time complexity are proposed: statistical critical path analysis and normal distribution-based analysis. The simulation results reveal that the circuit delay degradation and variation induced by RTN are both >20% and the maximum degradation and variation can be >30%. The effect of power supply tuning and gate sizing techniques on mitigating RTN is also investigated.