Variation And Aging Tolerance In Fpgas

Parameter variation and component aging are becoming a significant problems for all digital circuits including FPGAs. These effects degrade performance, increase power dissipation, and cause permanent faults at manufacturing time and during the lifetime of an FPGA. Several techniques have been developed to tolerate variation and aging in ASICs; FPGA designers have been quick to adopt and customize these strategies. While FPGAs can use many ASIC techniques verbatim, they have a distinct advantage to aid in the development of more innovate solutions: reconfigurability. Reconfigurability gives us the ability to spread wear effects over the chip which is not possible in ASICs. This chapter examines the impact of variation and wear on FPGAs and notes the benefit that can be gained from variation and aging tolerance techniques that operate open-loop.