Efficient signature selection tool for sense & react systems

Reconfigurable circuit design has become very important in the last decade for increasing the lifetime of CMOS circuits in deep sub-micron technologies. Sense & React approach is one of the reconfigurable design approaches, where degradation in a circuit performance is detected via sensor circuitry and a pre-established recovery operation is applied to circuit. However, sense operations are quite problematic since direct measurement of the degradation in circuit performance is highly complicated. Therefore, indirect measurements are preferred, in which one or more relevant circuit variables, which are called signatures, are selected out of measurable circuit quantities. Conventionally, the designer selects the signatures by performing an iterative search and evaluation on aging simulation results, and no such procedure has been defined in the literature yet. This paper proposes an efficient selection methodology and tool for determining efficient signatures for sense operation.