SHF: Small: A Digital System Paradigm for Yield and Robustness Enhancement via Global Analysis and Compensation

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Adoption of each new generation of nano-scale technology is accompanied by lower yields, stagnant performance or increasing chip-to-chip performance variability, and decreasing robustness to environmental stress. The objective of this research is to identify new avenues for design, analysis, and testing to help compensate for these trends. This research takes a global view of the role of a module in the overall system architecture. This research will focus on two specific issues, namely (1) the impact of a fault in a module on the overall system operation and performance, and (2) the ability to reconfigure one module to compensate for a fault in another module by preventing it from affecting the correct operation of any system or user task. Additional case studies will be conducted to further demonstrate that both these aspects of a global view significantly improve system yield and performance. A systematic approach will be developed to exploit such a global view to dramatically improve yield, performance, and robustness. A completely new framework ? models, information, analysis, and algorithms ? for assembling systems using faulty (and fault-free) components ? will also be developed. The utilitarian gains to society of this project are likely to be substantial. First, without changing any existing design, the proposed analysis and test approaches will provide significant improvements in yield, performance, and robustness to soft-errors. Second, the proposed analysis, design, test, and global compensation techniques will also help improve yields. Since the types of systems where this research is directly applicable include high-performance processors, the benefits provided will be amplified by the high price such processors fetch and the high volumes in which they are manufactured. Furthermore, since this research is orthogonal to much of the on-going research for improving yield and performance, improvements it provides can be combined with those provided by other approaches. Finally, this project will provide unique educational and training opportunities, for USC students as well as working professionals in the field.