Reliability- and Process-variation aware design of integrated circuits — A broader perspective

A broad review the literature for Reliability- and Process-variation aware VLSI design shows a re-emergence of the topic as a core area of active research. Design of reliable circuits with unreliable components has been a challenge since the early days of electro-mechanical switches and have been addressed by elegant coding and redundancy techniques. And radiation hard design principles have been used extensively for systems affected by soft transient errors. Additional modern reliability concerns associated with parametric degradation of NBTI and soft-broken gate dielectrics and proliferation of memory and thin-film technologies add new dimension to reliability-aware design. Taken together, these device, circuit, architectural, and software based fault-tolerant approaches have enabled continued scaling of integrated circuits and is likely to be a part of any reliability qualification protocol for future technology generations.