I-CORPS: A Tooolset for Lifetime Evaluation of Circuits and Systems

电子电路在运行过程中退化。最终，退化是如此之大，它导致电路不再正常工作。电子设备的用户期望使用寿命为10年。制造商目前使用制造的原型电路样品来检查寿命。寿命测试的失败是非常昂贵的，需要额外的重新设计工程成本和重新制造成本（数十万美元）。这个项目将开发软件来估计电子设备的寿命。将开发的工具集将在原型制造之前检查设计是否能够满足使用寿命要求，并将为需要修复的设计组件提供指导，以提高整个系统的使用寿命。该项目将开发软件，使半导体设计公司能够改善其产品的使用寿命，并检测可能限制产品使用寿命的设计组件。这将通过仿真工具来完成，这些仿真工具可以在考虑各种磨损机制和操作条件的同时估计电路的寿命分布。该软件将计算整个系统的活动和温度分布。这些与物理布局和晶体管模型相关联，以计算特征/晶体管级损耗统计。将特征/晶体管级损耗统计数据结合起来，以识别易受攻击的模块/组件，并估计整个电子系统的寿命分布。团队将进行客户发现，以获得对问题的进一步见解，并验证所提出的假设。

Electronic circuits degrade during operation. Eventually, the degradation is so large that it causes the circuits to no longer function properly. Customers of electronic devices expect a 10 year lifetime. Manufacturers currently check lifetime using manufactured samples of prototype circuits. Failures of lifetime tests are very costly and entail additional re-design engineering costs and the cost of re-fabrication (hundreds of thousands of dollars). This project will develop software to estimate the lifetime of electronic devices. The toolset that will be developed will check if a design can meet lifetime requirements prior to the manufacturing of prototypes and will provide guidance on the components of a design that need to be fixed so as to improve the lifetime of the full system.The project will develop software to enable semiconductor design companies to improve the lifetime of their products and to detect the components of a design that can limit the products' lifetime. This will be done with simulation tools that estimate the lifetime distributions of circuits while taking into account a wide variety of wearout mechanisms and operating conditions. The software will compute activity and temperature profiles of full systems. These are linked to the physical layout and transistor models to compute feature/transistor-level wearout statistics. The feature/transistor-level wearout statistics are combined to identify vulnerable blocks/components and to estimate the lifetime distribution of the full electronic system. The team will conduct customer dicovery to gain further insights further insights into the problem and to validate the proposed hypotheses.