Toward Increasing FPGA Lifetime

Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGAs) have been aggressively moving to lower gate length technologies. Such a scaling of technology has an adverse impact on the reliability of the underlying circuits in such architectures. Various different physical phenomena have been recently explored and demonstrated to impact the reliability of circuits both in the form of transient error susceptibility and permanent failures. In this work, we analyze the impact of two different types of hard errors, namely, Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) and Electro-migration (EM) on FPGAs. We also study the performance degradation of FPGAs over time caused by Hot Carrier Effects (HCE) and Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). Each such study is performed on the components of FPGAs most affected by the respective phenomena, both from performance and reliability perspective. Different solutions are demonstrated to counter each such failure and degradation phenomena to increase the operating lifetime of the FPGAs.