On-line process variation and reliability issues for dynamic systems with hard constraints and proactive controller

Francky Catthoor,  IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center), Leuven, Belgium

Abstract: The deep-submicron evolution leads to ever-growing reduction of the design margins and less reliable devices due to the shrinking dimensions. In order to mitigate these effects, and to still be able to guarantee acceptable yield and life-times for the future chips, it is well-accepted now that "reliable system design with unreliable components" is becoming a must. In this presentation, some of the underlying yield and reliability failure mechanisms will be illustrated first as motivational setting. But the main focus will be on how to mitigate these effects in future systems in deep-deep submicron technologies beyond 32 nm. We believe that is only feasible by abandoning the worst-case static design principles that are now the conventional way of dealing with these effects. Instead, in this seminar it will be shown that it is essential to develop on-line proactive controllers to steer dynamic systems while still providing hard guarantees on constraints (like timing, minimal yield and life times). At the same time these will allow to minimize the system cost, like area overhead in the mitigation infrastructure and the related energy consumption. We will show why recently introduced reactive control mechanisms in the state-of-the-art literature are still not sufficient to effectively deal with the global challenges that are ahead.

About the speaker: Francky Catthoor received a Ph.D. in EE from the Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Belgium in 1987. Between 1987 and 2000, he has headed several research domains in the area of high-level and system synthesis techniques and architectural methodologies, including related application and deep submicron technology aspects, all at IMEC Leuven, Belgium. Currently he is an IMEC fellow.

He is also part-time full professor at the EE department of the K.U.Leuven. He has been associate editor for several IEEE and ACM journals, like Trans. on VLSI Signal Procsesing, Trans. on Multi-media, and ACM TODAES. He was the program chair of several conferences including ISSS'97 and SIPS'01. He has been elected IEEE fellow in 2005.