Development of a high accuracy and stability test bench for ageing measurement of 16 nm FinFETs based FPGA. (November 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sobas, J.; Airimitoaie, T.-B.; Marc, F.
• Is Part Of: Microelectronics and reliability. Volume 138(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-11
• Subjects: FPGA test bench -- Ring oscillator -- FinFET reliability -- NBTI time exponent; TDDB Time-Dependent Dielectric Breakdown -- BTI Bias Temperature Instability -- HCI Hot Carrier Injection -- EM ElectroMigration -- FPGA Field-Programmable Gate Array -- RO Ring Oscillator -- TP Transition Probability -- EMa ElectroMagnetic -- US UnderSampling -- SYSMON SYStem MONitoring -- PMIC Power Management Integrated Circuit -- PL Programmable Logic -- PS Processor System -- LUT Look-Up Table -- SD Standard Deviation -- PPS Pulsation Per Second -- PWM Pulse Width Modulation -- LP Long Path; Electronic apparatus and appliances -- Reliability -- Periodicals; Miniature electronic equipment -- Periodicals; Appareils électroniques -- Fiabilité -- Périodiques; Équipement électronique miniaturisé -- Périodiques; Electronic apparatus and appliances -- Reliability; Miniature electronic equipment; Periodicals; 621.3815
• DOI: 10.1016/j.microrel.2022.114698
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0026-2714

Abstract

Abstract: This article describes the development of a test bench so as to measure the ageing of 16 nm FinFETs used in a Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA from Xilinx. The Ring Oscillator (RO) drift measurement method was chosen and implemented in the setup. However, RO is a circuit sensitive not only to ageing but also to temperature and voltage. In order to mitigate the undesired sensitivity to temperature and voltage, we installed a regulation system to control the temperature and the internal voltage of the FPGA, and we characterised the RO frequency in function of the temperature and the voltage to apply post-measurement compensations. We improved the measurement circuit by using the GPS signal as a time reference. 1000 h test with ( T FPGA = 100 ∘ C ) and ( V FPGA = V nom + 25%) was performed and results show clear RO frequency drifts lower than 0.1 % measured with an accuracy of 0.9 × 10 −4 . Highlights: FPGA test bench Ring Oscillator FinFET reliability NBTI time exponent