Analog circuit design automation against process variations and aging phenomena

Reliability of CMOS circuits has become a major concern due to substantially worsening process variations and aging phenomena in deep sub-micron devices. As a result, conventional analog circuit sizing tools have become incapable of promising a certain yield whether it is immediately after production or after a certain period of time. Thereby, analog circuit sizing tools have been replaced by better ones, where reliability is included in the conventional optimization problem. Variation-aware analog circuit synthesis has been studied for many years, and numerous methodologies have been proposed in the literature. On the other hand, as far as we know, there has not been any tool that takes lifetime into account during the optimization. Besides, there are a number of different issues with lifetime-aware circuit optimization, where aging analysis is still quite problematic due to modeling and simulation deficiencies. Furthermore, both tools suffer from the challenging trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Reconfigurable analog circuit design is another way of designing analog circuits against aging. However, design of a such complicated system is highly time consuming process to be performed by hand. Even though reconfigurable circuit design has been studied in the literature, there has been no attempt to automatize the design process to reduce the design time. With regard to aforementioned these problems, this study addresses all of these problems under a general title of reliability-aware analog circuit design automation, severally discusses them in detail, and proposes novel solutions to deal with not only existing but also not addressed problems.