Towards a Computationally Efficient Verilog-A Defect-Centric BTI Compact Model for Circuit Aging Simulations

Abstract

Complex physics-based models have been developed with the capability to capture typical BTI features like recovery, time-dependent variability and long-term saturation. However, for a successful EDA compact model, other practical criteria like stability (convergence) and computational efficiency are just as important as those functional features. In this paper, we perform a study a previously published Verilog-A based BTI model from the perspective of practical feasibility. To that end, (i) we analyze the computational performance of the BTI model, and (ii) we achieve an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency with a newly proposed methodology for reducing the number of traps.