SoC Mixed-Signal Dependability Enhancement: A Strategy from Design to End-of-Life

The ever shrinking technology dimensions have increased the degradation levels in integrated mixed-signal circuits mainly because of issues that were not considered in older technologies. These issues have posed new challenges and require a complete strategy starting from the design phase of the product to the end-of-life. This paper presents such a strategy starting with an early selection of dependable blocks at IP level and combines this with an efficient hardware platform architecture to address lifetime dependability issues especially for mixed-signal front ends. The proposed approach links the circuit/IP level dependability with the block level dependability enhancement and finally with the system level dependability enhancement strategy. The approach is supported by extensive simulations and provides confidence in using the proposed strategy.