The Reliability Of Analog Integrated Circuits And Their Simulation-Aided Verification

Determining how individual transistors degrade during normal operation and how these changes affect the circuit’s overall behavior: Different challenges have to be overcome when designing integrated circuits. Besides schematic and layout design work, verification in view of the non-ideal behavior of circuits and semiconductor technologies in particular is also relevant.
- The designed circuits have to work at specific operating voltages and within ambient temperature ranges and be robust in terms of process fluctuations and microscopic variations. - The interaction of the integrated circuit and design and connection technology, referred to as chip-package interaction (CPI), causes mechanical tensions that affect the behavior of integrated transistors in different ways, depending on their position in the overall system. - Integrated transistors age due to effects such as hot carrier injection (HCI) and bias temperature instability (BTI). This means their electrical behavior changes over time and depending on load and temperature. The exact relevance of these effects depends heavily on the product itself, the intended application scenario with its ambient conditions, and any special requirements, from the design style with the corresponding approach to these challenges to the semiconductor and packaging technologies used.