Leakage Current Analysis for Diagnosis of Bridge Defects in Power-Gating Designs.



Tenentes, Vasileios, Rossi, Daniele, Khursheed, S Saqib, Al-Hashimi, Bashir M and Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
(2018) Leakage Current Analysis for Diagnosis of Bridge Defects in Power-Gating Designs. IEEE Transactions on Computer - Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 37 (4). pp. 883-895.

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Abstract

Manufacturing defects that do not affect the functional operation of low power integrated circuits (ICs) can nevertheless impact their power saving capability. We show that stuck-ON faults on the power switches and resistive bridges between the power networks can impair the power saving capability of power-gating designs. For quantifying the impact of such faults on the power savings of power-gating designs, we propose a diagnosis technique that targets bridges between the power networks. The proposed technique is based on the static power analysis of a power-gating design in stand-by mode and it utilizes a novel on-chip signature generation unit, which is sensitive to the voltage level between power rails, the measurements of which are processed off-line for the diagnosis of bridges that can adversely affect power savings. We explore, through SPICE simulation of the largest IWLS'05 benchmarks synthesized using a 32 nm CMOS technology, the tradeoffs achieved by the proposed technique between diagnosis accuracy and area cost and we evaluate its robustness against process variation. The proposed technique achieves a diagnosis resolution that is higher than 98.6% and 97.9% for bridges of R ≳ 10 MQ (weak bridges) and bridges of R ≲ 10 MQ (strong bridges), respectively, and a diagnosis accuracy higher than 94.5% for all the examined defects. The area overhead is small and scalable: it is found to be 1.8% and 0.3% for designs with 27 K and 157 K gate equivalents, respectively.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Bridge circuits, Circuit faults, Rails, System-on-chips, Leakage currents
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 03 Jul 2017 13:33
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 07:00
DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2017.2729462
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3008302