Measurement of Aging Effect in a Digitally Controlled Inductive Voltage Regulator in 65nm

This paper characterizes the aging of a digitally controlled inductive voltage regulator (IVR) in 65nm CMOS due to Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI). It presents a framework which includes stress and measurement circuits to analyze aging effects on components of IVR. Measurements show that aging degrades transition speed, regulation quality, and efficiency and the aging of the feedback loop dominates performance degradation.