Reliability analysis based on significance

Due to the expected increase of defects and errors in circuits based on deep submicron technologies, reliability has become an important design criterion. As reliability improvement is generally achieved by adding redundancy, identify and classify critical blocks of a circuit is a major concern. This work presents two new classification methods regarding the significance of a block with respect to the reliability of a circuit. One gives the criticality of each block for the circuit reliability and the other indicates which priority should be given to each block in a process of adding redundancy. Thus, the proposed methods provide key information for the designer who is looking for efficient solutions of reliability monitoring or reliability improvement.