Long-Term and Short-Term Transistor Aging in Deep Neural Networks: Impact and Mitigation

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 2 Jun 2026] Long-Term and Short-Term Transistor Aging in Deep Neural Networks: Impact and Mitigation Alireza Sarmadi, Virinchi Roy Surabhi, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Hussam Amrouch, Ramesh Karri, Farshad Khorrami Deep neural networks (DNNs) are used in a variety of real-world applications including, for example, image classification and speech recognition. The inference accuracy of DNN implemented on hardware in integrated circuits (ICs) degrades under phenomena such as transistor aging. Aging slows down the switching speed of transistors, resulting in system-level timing violations due to unsustainable clocks. To maintain reliability for the entire projected lifetime, designers add guardbands to prevent timing violations; however, adding large timing guardbands causes losses in performance (speed or throughput). This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the effects of long-term and short-term transistor aging on DNN inference accuracy. Furthermore, to mitigate aging effects on DNN's accuracy and keep them at bay, a methodology for aging-aware retraining is presented in order to generate a resilient DNN even when aggressive (i.e., smaller than required) guardbands are used. This improves the inference accuracy of the DNNs even in the presence of aging-induced degradation. These effects are discussed in this chapter along with mitigation strategies on a hardware implementation of a DNN for image classification on an off-the-shelf image dataset. The application of short-term aging as an excitation mechanism for the detection of hardware Trojans in integrated circuits is also briefly discussed. Comments: 28 pages, 16 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2606.04266 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.04266v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04266 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Prashanth Krishnamurthy [view email] [v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 22:33:07 UTC (9,078 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)