Towards Accurate and Efficient Reliability Modeling of Nanoelectronic Circuits

The emergence of nanoelectronic devices which rely on fundamentally unreliable physics calls for reliability evaluation techniques and practical design-for-reliability solutions. This paper reviews a method that uses probabilistic gate models (PGMs) for reliability estimation and improves upon this method to enable the accurate evaluation of reliabilities of circuits. When applied to large, complex circuits, however, this and other accurate methods lead to long execution times. To simplify reliability analysis, this paper leverages the fact that many large circuits consist of common logic modules. The overall circuit reliability estimation can be made on the basis of accurate PGM-based reliabilities of individual modules. This technique significantly reduces the PGM method’s complexity, making it suitable for practical design-for-reliability applications. Results from the use of this technique on benchmark circuits indicate that the estimates produced correctly identify the most vulnerable paths through a circuit.