Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: Data-Efficient Uncovering of Rare Design Failures for Reliability-Critical Circuits

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While the proliferation of electronics has been driven by computing and consumer applications for a long time, integrated circuits (ICs) presently undergo accelerated integration into healthcare, transportation, robotics, and autonomous systems. In addition to provision of prescribed functionalities of sensing, computing, and processing, these ICs must meet stringent reliability specifications in order to safeguard performance and safety of the whole mission-critical system where deployed. Circuits designed to be fail-safe by design exhibit low occurrences of failure. However, having a sign of no failure under typical verification and test procedures yields no guarantee for meeting a given near-zero or extremely-low failure specification. On the other hand, exhaustiveness may never be achieved by brute-force failure detection, which results in an unacceptably high cost in simulation and testing. This project will develop efficient machine-learning techniques for extremely-rare circuit-failure detection without needing large amounts of expensive simulation or test data. The proposed techniques will enable cost-effective verification and test of reliability-critical ICs and mission-critical systems in general. The research undertaken will also enable the two groups at UC Santa Barbara and UT Dallas to educate and train undergraduate and graduate students, including women and underrepresented groups, thus expanding the and contributing to the much needed US technological workforce. It is believed that extracting critical failure information via machine learning within practical limits of available measurement or simulation data can go a long way towards extremely rare failure detection. This project centers on developing an active-learning framework that intelligently samples in the high-dimensional space of complex interacting design parameters, manufacturing variations, and operating conditions, achieving the goal of data-efficient detection of rare circuit failures. The targeted active-learning framework will be supported by the development of machine-learning model foundations and robust learning methods that can scale to high-dimensional parameter spaces. The key objective of this project is to make extremely-rare failure discovery and identification of the underlying failure mechanisms practically viable by extracting the maximum amount of useful information possible from a small amount of available data. The proposed extremely-rare failure discovery work will be broadly applicable to verification and failure analysis of analog, mixed-signal, radio-frequency, and memory circuits with stringent failure specifications and many other types of mission-critical systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.