FLAW: FPGA lifetime awareness

Aggressive scaling of technology has an adverse impact on the reliability of VLSI circuits. Apart from increasing transient error susceptibility, the circuits also become more vulnerable to permanent damage and failures due to different physical phenomenon. Such concerns have been recently demonstrated for regular microarchitectures. In this work we demonstrate the vulnerability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)s to two different types of hard errors, namely, Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) and Electro-migration. We also analyze the performance degradation of FPGAs over time caused by Hot Carrier Effects (HCE). We also propose three novel techniques to counter such aging based failures and increase the lifetime of the device. Catagories and Subject Descriptors: B.8.1 [Hardware]: Performance and Reliability: Reliability, Testing and Fault-Tolerance General Terms: Reliability, Algorithms, Experimentation

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Suresh Srinivasan, Prasanth Mangalagiri, Yuan Xie, Narayanan Vijaykrishnan, Karthik Sarpatwari
• Keywords: DAC 2006, Dependent Dielectric Breakdown, Design Automation, Programmable Gate Arrays, Transient Error Susceptibility