"Modeling and design of robust analog circuits"

- Georges Gielen, KU Leuven, Belgium

Microelectronics has drastically changed many applications in our life, including cars and the whole driving experience. Cars rely more and more upon electronic systems, that must be robust under all circumstances over the entire lifetime of the car. Integrated circuits however are vulnerable to influences inherent in manufacturing and usage. This presentation describes these phenomena and presents modeling and simulation approaches that help designers to analyse these phenomena in their designs before tapeout. In particular, the external influences such as EMI, and the effects of variability and aging due to phenomena such as BTI and soft breakdown may cause (time-dependent) malfunctioning of circuits. To prevent this from happening before the scheduled lifetime of a product, appropriate models and analysis tools are developed for designers to simulation the expected problems. In addition, special robust design techniques are discussed that adapt the hardware at run time to keep up the requested functionality over the entire lifetime. This will be illustrated with some practical examples.