Theory, methods, and tools for cross-layered design of uniquely efficient failure-resistant systems

在超越摩尔定律的时代，必须将提高集成电路对制造缺陷和变化、软错误和磨损造成的故障的抵抗力作为首要考虑因素，以确保半导体行业的经济可行性和数字系统的稳健运行。这项研究将开发和展示一种新的多层方法-跨越电路、微体系结构、指令集体系结构、系统和用户层-在提高对制造、软错误和磨损导致的故障的抵抗力方面的好处。将开发一种方法来表征每个模块内故障对用户层的影响，以显著减少未来抗故障系统中的过度设计和过度测试。这项研究还将开发第一个基础设施，以支持系统地开发多层抗故障方法，包括第一个全面的层模型，第一个识别候选方法并表征其性能和管理费用的系统方法，并得出全局最优设计。这种方法将确定高效的设计，这些设计将以独特的低管理费用实现抗故障能力。功利性的社会收益应该是立竿见影的，而且很可能是巨大的。开发的方法和工具将在成品率、性能、对软错误的稳健性和系统寿命方面提供显著改进。该项目将对学生和行业专家进行有效抗失效的科学和艺术方面的培训，并为摩尔定律结束后的时代做好准备。首席调查员还将向研究人员和行业专家社区分发作为该项目的结果而开发的模型、框架和工具。

In the era beyond Moore's law, it will be imperative to consider improving resistance of integrated circuits to failures due to fabrication defects and variations, soft errors, and wearout as first-order considerations, to ensure economic viability of the semiconductor industry and robust operation of digital systems. This research will develop and demonstrate the benefits of a new multi-layered approach - spanning circuit, micro-architecture, instruction-set architecture, system, and user layers - for improving resistance to failures caused by fabrication, soft errors, and wearout. An approach to characterize user-layer impact of failures within each module will be developed to dramatically reduce overdesign and overtesting in future failure resistant systems. This research will also develop the first infrastructure to support systematic development of multi-layered approaches for failure resistance, including the first comprehensive models of layers, the first systematic method to identify candidate approaches and characterize their performance and overheads, and to derive globally optimal designs. This approach will identify efficient designs that will achieve failure resistance at uniquely low overheads. The utilitarian gains to society should be immediate and and are likely to be substantial. The methods and tools developed will provide significant improvements in yield, performance, robustness to soft errors, and system lifespan. This project will train students and industry experts in the science and art of of efficient failure resistance, and prepare them for the era beyond the end of Moore's law. The principle investigator will also distribute to the community of researchers and industry experts the models, framework, and tools to be developed as a result of this project.