Circuit reliability has become a growing concern in today’s nanoelectronics, which motivates strong research interest over the years in reliability analysis and reliability-oriented circuit design. While quite a few approaches for circuit reliability analysis have been reported, there is a lack of comparative studies on their pros and cons in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. This paper provides an overview of some typical methods for reliability analysis with focus on gate-level circuits, large or small, with or without reconvergent fanouts. It is intended to help the readers gain an insight into the reliability issues, and their complexity as well as optional solutions. Understanding the reliability analysis is also a first step towards advanced circuit designs for improved reliability in the future research. 1. Introduction As CMOS technology keeps scaling down to their fundamental physical limits, electronic circuits have become less reliable than ever before [1]. The reason is manifold. First of all, the higher integration density and lower voltage/current thresholds have increased the likelihood of soft errors [2, 3]. Secondly, process variations due to random dopant fluctuation or manufacturing defects have negative impacts on circuit performance and may cause circuits to malfunction [1]. These physical-level defects would statistically lead to probabilistic device characteristics. Also, some emerging nanoscale electronic components (such as single electron devices) have demonstrated their nondeterministic characteristics due to uncertainty inherent in their operation under high temperature and external random noise [4, 5]. This may further degrade the reliability of future nanoelectronic circuits. Thus, circuit reliability has been a growing concern in today’s micro- and nanoelectronics, leading to the increasing research interest in reliability analysis and reliability-oriented circuit design. For any reliability-aware architecture design, it is indispensable to estimate the reliability of application circuits both accurately and efficiently. However, analyzing the reliability (or the error propagation) for logic circuits could be computationally expensive in general (see Section 1.3 for details). Some approaches have been reported in literature, which tackle the problem either analytically or numerically (by simulation). The contribution of this paper is to provide an extensive overview and comparative study on typical reliability estimation methods with our simulation results and/or results reported in literature. We first review the key
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