Reliability analysis for digital circuits
Robustness Analysis
Robust system design is becoming increasingly important, because of the ongoing miniaturization of integrated circuits, the increasing effects of aging mechanisms, and the effects of parasitic elements, both intrinsic and external.
However, the complexity of contemporary systems makes it difficult to fulfill tight specifications. For this reason, robustness must be integrated into a partially automated design flow.
Resilient Cross-Layer Design
While there has been a considerable amount of work to handle issues like process variability, soft errors and aging at the gate and circuit levels, methods at the software and system levels have received considerably less attention. Further, the interaction between the system and circuit levels - in order to improve the techniques at both levels - is still mostly unexplored.
Filling this gap requires models for technology abstraction which accurately characterize the error/variability causes at the circuit level while taking system level design
decisions like operating frequency into account.
Resilient system level design methods have to utilize such models to provide additional design decisions and accurately characterize the possible tradeoff between reliability, performance and power.