Efficient Aging-aware Failure Probability Estimation Using Augmented Reliability and Subset Simulation

A circuit-aging simulation that efficiently calculates temporal change of rare circuit-failure probability is proposed. While conventional methods required a long computational time due to the necessity of conducting separate calculations of failure probability at each device age, the proposed Monte Carlo based method requires to run only a single set of simulation. By applying the augmented reliability and subset simulation framework, the change of failure probability along the lifetime of the device can be evaluated through the analysis of the Monte Carlo samples. Combined with the two-step sample generation technique, the proposed method reduces the computational time to about 1/6 of that of the conventional method while maintaining a sufficient estimation accuracy

Modular DFR: Digital Delayed Feedback Reservoir Model for Enhancing Design Flexibility

A delayed feedback reservoir (DFR) is a type of reservoir computing system well-suited for hardware implementations owing to its simple structure. Most existing DFR implementations use analog circuits that require both digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters for interfacing. However, digital DFRs emulate analog nonlinear components in the digital domain, resulting in a lack of design flexibility and higher power consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel modular DFR model that is suitable for fully digital implementations. The proposed model reduces the number of hyperparameters and allows flexibility in the selection of the nonlinear function, which improves the accuracy while reducing the power consumption. We further present two DFR realizations with different nonlinear functions, achieving 10x power reduction and 5.3x throughput improvement while maintaining equal or better accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) 2023. Will appear in ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS

Efficient aging-aware SRAM failure probability calculation via particle filter-based importance sampling

An efficient Monte Carlo (MC) method for the calculation of failure probability degradation of an SRAM cell due to negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is proposed. In the proposed method, a particle filter is utilized to incrementally track temporal performance changes in an SRAM cell. The number of simulations required to obtain stable particle distribution is greatly reduced, by reusing the final distribution of the particles in the last time step as the initial distribution. Combining with the use of a binary classifier, with which an MC sample is quickly judged whether it causes a malfunction of the cell or not, the total number of simulations to capture the temporal change of failure probability is significantly reduced. The proposed method achieves 13:4× speed-up over the state-ofthe-art method

Bayesian Estimation of Multi-Trap RTN Parameters Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method

Random telegraph noise (RTN) is a phenomenon that is considered to limit the reliability and performance of circuits using advanced devices. The time constants of carrier capture and emission and the associated change in the threshold voltage are important parameters commonly included in various models, but their extraction from time-domain observations has been a difficult task. In this study, we propose a statistical method for simultaneously estimating interrelated parameters: the time constants and magnitude of the threshold voltage shift. Our method is based on a graphical network representation, and the parameters are estimated using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Experimental application of the proposed method to synthetic and measured time-domain RTN signals was successful. The proposed method can handle interrelated parameters of multiple traps and thereby contributes to the construction of more accurate RTN models

Automation of Model Parameter Estimation for Random Telegraph Noise

The modeling of random telegraph noise (RTN) of MOS transistors is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for realizing automated estimation of two important RTN-model parameters: the number of interface-states and corresponding threshold voltage shift. The proposed method utilizes a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to represent the voltage distributions, and estimates their parameters using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Using information criteria, the optimal estimation is automatically obtained while avoiding overfitting. In addition, we use a shared variance for all the Gaussian components in the GMM to deal with the noise in RTN signals. The proposed method improved estimation accuracy when the large measurement noise is observed