Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Over the last four decades, silicon technology scaling has remarkably improved the integrated circuits (ICs) by increasing the transistor density and operating frequency while reducing the cost and energy consumption per transistor. However, scaling in the sub-65 nanometer regime has brought a number of reliability issues. In particular, due to the small device dimension and low operating voltages, nanoscale ICs show more sensitive to operational disturbances, reduced reliability margin and wear-out lifetimes. In addition, the scaling of silicon technology also makes ICs more vulnerable to single event effects (SEE) induced by energetic particles. In a well-designed IC, soft errors induced by SEE appear to be the most troublesome both in terrestrial and high altitude or space environment. In this proposal, built-in self-repair combined with built-in self-test methods will be developed to enable ICs to self-diagnose and self-repair hard failures during field operations. The developed methods will be implemented with advanced complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies to evaluate their effectiveness. The soft errors will also be characterized and modeled through the 40nm CMOS test chips provided by the industrial partner. Laser and 3-D Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulation tools will be used for the investigation, so that SEE mitigation methods can be effectively developed. The Canadian industry partner (Cisco Canada) can directly adopt the technologies developed from this project to improve the lifetime and reliability of their produces such as switches and linecards, which can significantly improve the performance and reduce the maintenance cost. The project will also enhance the capability and expertise of the research group in the area of microelectronics reliability at the University of Saskatchewan. In this project, one M.Sc., one Ph.D., one postdoctoral fellow and two summer students will be trained to advance the technology and to work closely with the industrial partners.