Designing reliable analog circuits in an unreliable world

Reliability is one of the major concerns in designing integrated circuits in deep nanometer CMOS technologies. Problems related to transistor aging like BTI or soft breakdown cause time-dependent circuit performance degradation. Variability only makes these things more severe. This creates a need for innovative design techniques and tools that help designers coping with these reliability and variability problems. This invited overview paper gives a brief description of device aging models. It also presents tools for the efficient analysis and identification of reliability problems in analog circuits. Finally, it proposes solutions for the design of resilient, self-healing circuits.