Design of built-in current sensors for concurrent checking in radiation environments

M. Nicolaidis (1, 2) , F. Hernan Vargas (1) , B. Courtois (1)

1 TIMA - Techniques de l'Informatique et de la Microélectronique pour l'Architecture des systèmes intégrés
2 IROC TECHNOLOGIES - iROc Technologies

A technique for concurrently checking faults in static CMOS circuits is proposed. It performs concurrent monitoring of static current by means of built-in current sensors (BICS) and detects the leakage current that accompanies the parametric shifts. Using BICs also allows the selection of high-quality circuits during manufacturing testing, resulting in a higher mean time to failure.

Keywords: built-in-current-sensors; concurrent-checking; radiation-environments; static-CMOS-circuits; leakage-current; parametric-shifts; high-quality-circuits

Domains: Micro and nanotechnologies/Microelectronics

M. Nicolaidis, F. Hernan Vargas, B. Courtois. Design of built-in current sensors for concurrent checking in radiation environments. IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, 1993, Dec. ; 40(6) pt. 1, pp.1584-90. ⟨10.1109/23.273553⟩. ⟨hal-00013984⟩