Hierarchical Perspective On Reliability Models

As technology continues to scale and decrease in size, the reliability of transistors is becoming an ever increasing problem. Previous second order effects are becoming more pronounced, and other effects, reliability effects, as we shall see, are changing the operation of devices and can even cease to operate properly. The purpose of this project is to investigate device reliability from a hierarchical viewpoint that will differ from previous work. We begin with a bottom up approach in which we investigate the effects of device reliability beginning at the transistor-level, and hierarchically build up models to predict reliability effects at a broader circuit-level.