Comparative analysis of NBTI effects on low power and high performance flip-flops

Abstract

Mitigating the circuit aging effect in digital circuits has become a very important concern for current and future technology nodes. Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is one of the most important circuit aging mechanisms, which can incur timing errors. Flip-flops play a vital role as storage elements in pipelined architectures and are prone to effects of aging. NBTI increases the transistor threshold voltage, affecting the performance of the chip. In this paper, we study the effects of NBTI on the timing characteristics of different types of low power and high performance flip-flops. Factors such as input data probability and temperature which affect the degradation rate are also analyzed.