CMOS technology scaling allows the design of even more complex system but, at the same time, introduces some reliability problems. In particular, aggressively scaled microelectronic technologies are affected by the Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) aging phenomenon that results in an increase of the absolute value of the transistor threshold voltage with aging time and a consequent reduction for the microelectronic circuit reliability. In this paper we estimate the performance degradation caused by BTI on an operational amplifier (OPAMP) in open loop configuration as well as on three other analog amplifiers based on OPAMPs. The results have shown that BTI can seriously impact the performance of the investigated circuits, and that such performance degradation worsens as operating temperature increases. We also briefly describe a possible low-cost monitoring scheme to detect the performance degradation of the OPAMPs caused by BTI. The effectiveness of our monitor has been validated by means of pre-layout electrical simulations, and the results have shown that it can be reliably used to evaluate the OPAMPs aging degradation.

CMOS 技术缩放允许设计更复杂的系统，但同时也引入了一些可靠性问题。特别是，大规模微电子技术受到偏置温度不稳定性 (BTI) 老化现象的影响，该现象导致晶体管阈值电压的绝对值随老化时间增加，从而导致微电子电路可靠性降低。在本文中，我们估计了 BTI 在开环配置中的运算放大器 (OPAMP) 以及基于 OPAMP 的其他三个模拟放大器上导致的性能下降。结果表明，BTI 会严重影响所研究电路的性能，并且这种性能下降会随着工作温度的升高而恶化。我们还简要描述了一种可能的低成本监控方案，以检测由 BTI 引起的 OPAMP 的性能下降。我们的监视器的有效性已通过布局前的电气模拟得到验证，结果表明它可以可靠地用于评估 OPAMP 的老化退化。