Chapter 18
Reliability of Nanoelectronic VLSI
18.1 Introduction
The advent of embedded systems applied in safety-critical fields such as in situ medical prosthetic microelectronic circuits or space applications has brought forward the need for increased reliability at the system level. Down-time or repair of such systems is virtually out of question due to the criticality of their operation and their physical locations that are difficult or out of reach. Modern microelectronic systems have been increasingly suffering from permanent failure mostly due to the manufacturing process that involves numerous fabrication steps, and shrinking device dimensions, and transient failure where a variable system timeout is needed to recover full functionality, such as those that occur following the interaction with high-energy particles that may be encountered in space or radioactive environments. More recently, delay faults have become a major concern, related to multigigahertz operating frequencies, larger digital integrated circuits, and longer size of the critical paths, causing an increased risk of data and clock synchronization loss. Crosstalk between parallel transmission lines has also become a serious source of potential errors, with the development of multiple layers of metallization, and the decrease in the noise margins. ...
