Integrated Circuits and Systems Group

Dr. Thomas Schmid
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, August 17, 5:00pm, ACES 2.402

Hijacking Power and Bandwidth from the Mobile Phone’s Audio Interface

This talk will present our recent work on enabling pervasive personal sensing, focusing on HiJack, a system for stealing power and bandwidth from the mobile phone’s audio jack. HiJack enables a new tier of small and cheap phone-centric sensor peripherals that support plug-and-play operation. More broadly, we envision the mobile phone will become a portal for perpetually-powered and physically-embedded sensors. Our harvester delivers 7.4~mW to a load with 47% efficiency using components that cost $2.34 in 10K volume. Integrating the pieces, this talk will present a combined system for delivering data and power over audio, and demonstrate its use by turning an iPhone into an inexpensive oscilloscope.

Prof. Azadeh Davoodi
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, August 18, 5:00pm, ACES 2.402

Automation Techniques for Post-silicon Debug of Timing Failures

The complexity of modern day electronic systems combined with nano-scale non-idealities have made “post-silicon” validation significantly cumbersome. At this stage few fabricated chips are verified for correct functionality in order to detect and fix the bugs which have escaped the design stage. The process has become time-consuming and expensive due to the costs of equipments and of (improved) silicon re-spins, the use of manual techniques, and the complicated nature of bugs in nano-scale technologies. Consequently, time-to-market and profit are directly at stake in many design domains.

One of the most challenging tasks in post-silicon validation is debugging for timing failures. Timing failures may be caused by factors such as (static) process variations and (transient) power droop. In this talk I will give an overview of our ongoing research towards automation of the debug process for timing failures. I will discuss our procedures for the following two cases (and mostly on the first case): 1) when the cause of timing failure is static process variations, and 2) when on-chip logic analyzers are used for capturing transient behavior and are intended to increase the “timing observability” inside the chip.