24. 10. 2014

Low Power System Design


Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus

BTU Cottbus

Sondertermin: 11:30 Uhr, INF/3105

Electronic systems of today benefit from ever-increasing density and functionality of basic circuits. But large-scale integration is now approaching physical limits, whereby power dissipation is among the most crucial points. On the other hand, new systems and applications require amounts of computing power that cannot be realized with existing technologies due to power requirements. The main question then is where and how to save power. The tutorial tries to introduce means of saving power from circuit design via processor architecture to software and algorithms in order to explore, where power can be saved at what cost. We start with basic mechanisms of power dissipation in CMOS, look at innovative logic designs like sub-threshold and adiabatic logic, and end up with management of clock trees. For processors, we take a look at design principles and micro-architectures with respect to power dissipation, finally ending up in more or less power hungry algorithms. Next interdependencies between fault tolerance, reliability and power are discussed. Finally, we take a short look at principles of energy harvesting.

24. 10. 2014

Self Repair Technology for Integrated Circuits


Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus

BTU Cottbus


The down-scaling of feature size in integrated circuit technologies has yielded an almost exponential growth in performance over the last 45 years. With dimensions now reaching dimensions of 20 nanometers and below, however, integrated circuits are becoming less reliable than before, due to a variety of different fault effects. Smaller feature size and reduced voltage levels make circuits more susceptible to transient fault effects, for example by particle radiation. On the other hand, thermal stress promotes aging effects, which results in reliable circuit operation for much less than the decades shown by older generations of ICs. Even worse, extra circuits used for transient fault detection and correction always costs extra power, which reduces circuit life time. In order to yield long-living dependable systems from not highly reliable components, built-in self repair (BISR) has been discussed for several years. BISR uses "fresh" redundant resources for repair and has found widespread application in embedded memory blocks of large-scale integrated systems. In the tutorial, we introduce fault mechanisms and error correction first. Then we explain built-in self repair for logic structures, based on re-organization by either hardware or software.
28. Oct 2020
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