Design for Reliability with Early Design Approach

With increasing demand of IoT device and Autonomous driving technology, the need for high performance designs to perform reliably under extreme conditions has become an absolute necessity. In addition to the harsh conditions, the devices must be able to work at high speeds to meet the performance demands. This means the hardware must work in very high temperatures and harsh environmental conditions quickly and reliably. This causes increasing challenges in Reliability verification of hardware designs to ensure the machine is both robust and reliable. There are various reliability aspects such as latch-up, electrostatic discharge (ESD), hot carrier effects and electromigration that are observed in IC design. Several factors impact the reliability verification of design such as process technology used, library design, routing, frequency, voltage and the usage conditions. In order to model all of this correctly, Sign off RV is run in final stages of design when all the layout and design collaterals have stabilized and this effort spent on fixing RV has an impact on Time to Market. In this paper we mainly show how some of the electromigration challenges can be addressed in design early on through correct by construction approach.