Berkeley reliability tools-BERT

Abstract

Berkeley reliability tools (BERT) simulates the circuit degradation (drift) due to hot-electron degradation in MOSFETs and bipolar transistors and predicts circuit failure rates due to oxide breakdown and electromigration in CMOS, bipolar, and BiCMOS circuits. With the increasing importance of reliability in today's and future technology, a reliability simulator such as this is expected to serve as the engine of design-for-reliability in a building-in-reliability paradigm. BERT works in conjunction with a circuit simulator such as SPICE in order to simulate reliability for actual circuits, and, like SPICE, acts as an interactive tool for design. BERT is introduced and the current work being done is summarized. BERT is used to study the reliability of a BiCMOS inverter chain, and performance data are presented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>