Reliability of analogue circuits

Abstract

The reliability of CMOS circuits has worsened due to technology scaling. From the review of previous work on reliability study for CMOS circuits, it has been found that both digital and analogue circuits were susceptible to single event effects. Single event effects although causing non-permanent errors have already been identified to have caused billion of dollars worth of lost. Single event transients have been established as one of the single event effects which may reduce the reliability of analogue circuits and safety critical systems, in general. The impact of radiation effects on analogue circuits has been investigated in this thesis using circuit-level single event transient modelling. The characterization of impact of single event transient has been investigated for several analogue circuits. These analogue circuits; namely operational amplifier and comparator, have been recognized to be susceptible to single event transients. Several influencing factors have been associated with previous works and this study to have impacts on the severity of the single event transients to these circuits. Sensitivity analysis has been completed to determine the most and the least sensitive transistor to be used in the variability analysis. The variability analysis addresses the impact of the influencing factors and this information may be used in finding the trade-off which exists between the influencing factors and single event transient. These trade-offs may also be used in mitigating the single event transient. A simple mitigation technique still at preliminary stage has also been included, as part of this study.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Zwolinski: orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-625X

ORCID for Basel Halak: orcid.org/0000-0003-3470-7226

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