Design of prognostic circuit for electromigration failure of integrated circuit

A prognostic circuit for electromigration failure of integrated circuit was proposed, and it was simulated on the base of the SMIC 0.18 um mixed-signal CMOS process model. The prognostic circuit is composed of stress and detection module, two-stage comparator, offset voltage cancellation module, non-overlapping clock generation module, and output module. When the increase amount of resistance for interconnect line exceeds a preset value due to electromigration, the output of the prognostic circuit designed to fail faster will jump from low voltage to high voltage. It indicates the impending failure of hosted circuit because of that the prognostic circuit experiences the same manufacturing process and operational environment as the hosted circuit. The research results are useful for the prediction of performance degradation and failure of integrated circuit.