Modeling and Analyzing NBTI in the Presence of Process Variation

With continuous scaling of transistors in each technology generation, NBTI and Process Variation (PV) have become very important silicon reliability problems for the microprocessor industry. In this paper, the authors develop an analytical model to capture the impact of NBTI in the presence of PV for use in architecture simulations. They capture the following aspects in the model: Variation in NBTI related to stress and recovery due to workloads, temporal variation in NBTI due to Random Charge Fluctuation (RCF) and Random Dopant Fluctuation (RDF) due to process variation.