Title | Leakage Current Analysis for Diagnosis of Bridge Defects in Power-Gating Designs |
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Authors | Tenentes, V., Rossi, D., Khursheed, S., Al-Hashimi, B.M. and Chakrabarty, K. |
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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 synthesised using a 32 nm CMOS technology, the trade-offs 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 ≳ 10MΩ(weak bridges) and bridges of R ≲ 10MΩ (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 27K and 157K gate equivalents, respectively. |
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Keywords | power gating, diagnosis, bridging faults, stuck- ON faults, fault grading |
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Journal | IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems |
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Journal citation | 37 (4), pp. 883-895 |
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ISSN | 0278-0070 |
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Year | 2018 |
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Publisher | IEEE |
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Accepted author manuscript | |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2017.2729462 |
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Publication dates |
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Published | 19 Jul 2017 |
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Published online | 19 Jul 2017 |
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Published in print | Apr 2018 |
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