On-chip aging compensation for output driver

In this paper an on-chip aging compensation technique for CMOS output driver is proposed. It contains an aging compensation cell which will detect the degradation in the ON current (ION) of output driver due to the HCI and BTI effect. Based on the degradation in the ION the aging compensation cell will generate aging compensation codes AP[0∶3] for PMOS driver and AN[0∶3] for NMOS driver. These aging compensation codes will increase the drive strength of output driver to compensate the degradation in ION of output driver due to HCI and BTI effect. The proposed design is implemented in 40nm CMOS process by using 1.8V thick-oxide (32Å) devices. The measurement result shows that by using the proposed aging compensation technique the impact of aging on output driver get reduced by 70% after 10 years of operation.