Automated CHIP MTBF Calculator

Synchronizers are used in sampling an asynchronous data for digital circuits. It protects the chips from metastability failure. The traditional method of chip mean time between failure (MTBF) calculation is spreadsheet calculation, with fixed data and clock skew assumption at synchronizer flop. The traditional chip level MTBF calculation only considers the effective slack of each synchronizer chain, the asynchronous data rate and the synchronizer chain frequency as design’s dependent factors. The effective slack of each synchronous chain, however, can be fixed by hardening the synchronizer chain during design instantiation. The impact of data and clock slew variation to chip level MTBF is not accounted in traditional chip level MTBF calculation. The objective of this paper is to share automated chip level MTBF calculation with data slew and clock slew for each synchronizer chains. Hopefully the sharing will benefit the readers.