Leveraging Public Information to Fit a Compact Hot Carrier Injection Model to a Target Technology

Abstract

The design of countermeasures against integrated circuit counterfeit recycling requires the ability to simulate aging in CMOS devices. Electronic design automation tools commonly provide this ability; however, their models must be tuned for use with a specific target technology. This requires data which is ideally provided by a fab. It may also be collected from a set of purpose-built test devices, a costly and time-consuming process. Here we describe a novel, low-cost, and rapid approach to tuning such models. Our iterative method leverages public domain data sourced from published studies to fit an aging model. Results are statistically validated against the target technology’s specification. We demonstrate our approach by fitting a compact hot carrier injection degradation model for use with both core and I/O nMOSFETs from a specific 65 nm technology. Our resulting model parameter values are validated with a maximum error of 0.5% with a 99% confidence bound.

Keywords

• Aging
• circuit simulation
• degradation
• hot carrier injection stress effect
• integrated circuit modeling
• iterative methods