Chip Health Tracking Using Dynamic In-Situ Delay Monitoring

Abstract

Tracking the gradual effect of silicon aging requires fine-grain slack monitoring. Conventional slack monitoring techniques intend to measure worst-case static slack, i.e. the slack of longest timing path. In sharp contrast to the conventional techniques, we propose a novel technique that is based on dynamic excitation of in-situ delay monitors, i.e. dynamic excitation of the timing paths that are monitored. As the delays degrade, the path delays increase and the monitors are excited more frequently. With the proposed technique, a fine-grained signature of the delay degradation is extracted from the excitation rate of monitors.