Hefei University of Technology Achieves Breakthrough in Integrated Circuit Reliability with 6T SRAM Self-Heating Effect Characterization
Hefei University of Technology Achieves Breakthrough in Integrated Circuit Reliability with 6T SRAM Self-Heating Effect Characterization
A Chinese research team has made new progress in the field of integrated circuits. Recently, the Edge Defect Testing Research Team from the System Architecture Research Laboratory at Hefei University of Technology proposed a method for characterizing the self-heating effect in 6T SRAM (FinFET process) and experimentally validated it on a high-performance FPGA platform based on FinFET technology.
As integrated circuit technology nodes continue to evolve, the use of 3D transistor structures and advanced materials has intensified the self-heating effect of transistors. This accelerates defect generation, reduces drive current, increases transistor power consumption, and consequently leads to a decline in transistor reliability, which can severely result in circuit failure. Therefore, effectively characterizing the self-heating effect in high-density SRAM based on advanced nano processes is of great significance for the reliability research of circuits. The team utilized duty cycle and circuit performance parameters, read delay time, to achieve the self-heating effect characterization of 6T SRAM.
The article simulated the hold, read, and write states of 6T SRAM using the Hspice tool, analyzing the impact of the self-heating effect on different states of 6T SRAM. Furthermore, by changing the duty cycle in the read state and extracting the read delay parameter changes with the duty cycle, it was found that the read delay showed increasing, constant, and decreasing trends. The study deeply analyzed the underlying mechanisms and effectively used changes in read delay for self-heating effect characterization.
Finally, experimental validation was conducted on an FPGA platform based on the FinFET process. The research results indicate that the proposed self-heating effect characterization method can be used for characterization temperature ranges of transient temperature: 0-84.5°C, and circuit temperature: 0-48.8°C
