AMS and RF design for reliability methodology

The design for reliability concept is already in use on digital circuits, but not systematically in use on AMS or RF circuits. A reliable circuit design demands knowledge of the physical degradation and models to analyze the reliability in earlier stages. Also, it needs to be simple enough to be used on the redesign. In this work, we propose and validate an AMS and RF circuit design for reliability method. In order to investigate our method, we have designed a 5-3 NOR interpolative Digital Controlled Oscillator (DCO) near 1 GHz applications. This design example has presented 1.4% decrease of oscillation frequency, 0.2% decrease of phase noise for a 1 MHz off-set, and 2.1% decrease of power consumption after 10 years of degradation. According with the trends presented in Table I, we estimate that the f_osc ageing degradation was improved of 13% by applying the design for reliability method.