Reliability prediction of FinFET FPGAs by MTOL

The MTOL (Multi-Temperature Operational Life) testing method was implemented on FPGA boards from Xilinx 16 nm FinFET technology using non-aggressive stress conditions. Various sized ring oscillator (RO) circuits were subjected to numerous, uniformly scaled, temperature and voltage conditions to generate an impartial profile of the failure phenomena. This study shows that, compared to HCI, EM and TDDB, BTI has the dominant impact on the device lifetime. The testing shows a small but consistent linear increase in degradation rate for shorter (higher frequency) ROs. We show strong evidence that this frequency effect is attributed to self-heating of the Fins during the transition time. The increase in temperature due to current induced self-heating was measured up to 1 GHz and extrapolated to 3 GHz. The RO degradation distributions, presented on Weibull plots, produce accurate times to fail for reliability prediction. We demonstrate the advantage of the MTOL method over other prominent verification methods to fully characterize the total reliability of packaged FinFET technology over their lifetime.