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Conditional autoregressive Transformer for NBTI aging trajectory prediction
Qin Haobin, Wang Zherui, Shan Shushan, Fang Liquan, Zheng Feijun
Integrated Circuits and Embedded Systems ›› 2026, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (11) : 14-25.
PDF(12784 KB)
PDF(12784 KB)
Conditional autoregressive Transformer for NBTI aging trajectory prediction
As CMOS technology nodes continue to scale down, aging effects such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) have become increasingly significant and have emerged as critical factors affecting circuit reliability. Accurate prediction of the aging-induced performance degradation in integrated circuits can mitigate the risk of in-field failures. A promising prediction paradigm involves the continuous collection of chip operating conditions, including supply voltage, temperature, signal duty cycle, and partial performance-degradation information, and constructing a machine-learning model that uses past degradation observations to forecast future degradation trends. Such a capability aligns closely with the objectives of Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM), which seeks to monitor, analyze, and optimize chip performance throughout its operational lifetime. In this paper, we propose the Conditional Autoregressive Transformer (CAT), a decoder-only sequential prediction model that, conditioned on chip operating conditions and historical degradation traces, predicts the degradation trajectory over a future time horizon. CAT leverages causal attention mechanisms to capture the temporal dependencies inherent in NBTI aging dynamics, enabling multi-step extrapolation from partial sensor data. Experimental results demonstrate that CAT achieves accurate degradation forecasting, offering a practical solution for SLM-driven reliability management in advanced CMOS technologies.
NBTI / circuit reliability / aging trajectory prediction / Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) / sequential prediction / decoder-only Transformer
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As CMOS technology continues to scale down, the aging effect—known as negative bias temperature instability (NBTI)—has become increasingly prominent, gradually emerging as a key factor affecting device reliability. Accurate aging-aware static timing analysis (STA) at the early design phase is critical for establishing appropriate timing margins to ensure circuit reliability throughout the chip lifecycle. However, traditional aging-aware timing analysis methods, typically based on Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) simulations or aging-aware timing libraries, struggle to balance prediction accuracy with computational cost. In this paper, we propose a multi-view graph learning framework for path-level aging-aware timing prediction, which combines the strengths of the spatial–temporal Transformer network (STTN) and graph attention network (GAT) models to extract the aging timing features of paths from both timing-sensitive and workload-sensitive perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves an average MAPE score of 3.96% and reduces the average MAPE by 5.8 times compared to FFNN and 2.2 times compared to PNA, while maintaining acceptable increases in processing time.
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