Detecting intermittent resistive faults in digital CMOS circuits

Interconnection reliability threats dependability of highly critical electronic systems. One of most challenging interconnection-induced reliability threats are intermittent resistive faults (IRFs). The occurrence rate of this kind of defects can take e.g. one month, and the duration of defects can be as short as a few nanoseconds. As a result, evoking and detecting these faults is a big challenge. IRFs can cause timing deviations in data paths in digital systems during its operating time. This paper proposes an online digital slack monitor which is able to detect small timing deviations caused by IRFs in digital systems. The simulation results show that the proposed monitor is effective in detecting IRFs.