Probabilistic gate level fault modeling for near and sub-threshold CMOS circuits

This paper presents gate level delay dependent probabilistic fault models for CMOS circuits operating at sub-threshold and near-threshold supply voltages. A bottom-up approach has been employed: SPICE simulations have been used to derive higher level error models implemented using Verilog HDL. HSPICE Monte-Carlo simulations show that the delay dependent probabilistic nature of these faults is due to the process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations which affect the circuits operating at very low supply voltages. For gate level error analysis, mutant based simulated fault injection (SFI) techniques have been employed for combinational net list reliability analysis. Four types of gate level fault models, with different accuracies, are proposed. Our findings show that the proposed SFI method presents a 2X-5X simulation time overhead compared to the simulation of the gold circuit, with respect to SPICE analysis, the proposed method requires three orders of magnitude less simulation time.