ICS Seminar: Mehdi Tahoori

Posted on February 12, 2013

Date: Feb. 21th, 11am
Location: ACE 6.336

Title:
Crosslayer Soft Error Analysis: From Circuit Layout to Application Software

Abstract:
Radiation-induced Soft errors are major reliability concerns in systems manufactured at nanoscale technology nodes. This is mostly due to increased number of devices per system, as a side effect of Moore¹s law, and increased chance of multiple upsets, resulting in multiple errors, because of smaller geometries. Between the particle strike on the silicon substrate and its
effect as a system failure, there are various levels of error propagation and masking. These factors need to be quantified in details to accurately account for system reliability and also identify the most vulnerable components in the overall hardware-software design stack for cost-effective reliability improvement. In this talk I will discuss a cross-layer approach for soft
error modeling and propagation by considering various factors from circuit layout all the way to the software application.

Bio:
Mehdi Tahoori, is professor and Chair of Dependable Nano-Computing (CDNC) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany since 2009. Before that he was an associate professor of ECE at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2002, respectively. He has been on the organizing and technical program committee of various design automation, test, and dependability conferences such as DATE, ICCAD, ITC, ETS, GLSVLSI, DSN, and IOLTS. He has organized various workshops, panels, tutorials and special session in major design and test conferences, such as DATE, ICCAD, and VTS. He is an associate editor of ACM Journal of Emerging Technologies for Computing. He was the recipient of NSF CAREER Award.

ICS Seminar: Sani Nassif

Posted on November 12, 2012

From Circuits to Cancer

Dr. Sani Nassif
IBM Austin Research Lab

Nov. 20 (Tuesday), 4-5pm
ACES 2.402

Abstract:

The human race has invested about a trillion dollars in the development of semiconductor electronics, and our lives have been improved greatly as a result. Smart devices are now taken for granted and permeate every aspect of our existence. The development of such complex devices is extremely difficult and error-prone, thus the IC design community has made large investments in synthesis, simulation, verification, and overall automation to allow such designs to be built. It turns out, happily, that much of this Silicon R&D is applicable to other areas… This talk will be about one such area, namely that of Proton radiation cancer therapy, where a team at IBM, working with researchers at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Research center, have been busy applying knowledge from VLSI to this important area, and producing results that are poised to revolutionize the quality and efficiency of such therapy.


Speaker Bio:

Sani received his Bachelors degree with Honors from the American University of Beirut in 1980, and his Masters and PhD degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 and 1985 respectively. He then worked for ten years at Bell Laboratories in the general area of technology CAD, focusing on various aspects of design and technology coupling including device modeling, parameter extraction, worst case analysis, design optimization and circuit simulation. While at Bell Labs, working under Larry Nagel -the original author of Spice, he led a large team in the development of an in-house circuit simulator, named Celerity, which became the main circuit simulation tool at Bell Labs.

In January 1996, he joined the then newly formed IBM Austin Research Laboratory (ARL), which was founded with a specific focus on research for the support of IBM’s Power computer systems. After ten years of management, he stepped down to focus on technical work again, and he is currently working on applying techniques developed in the VLSI-EDA area to IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative.

Sani has authored numerous conference and journal publications, and delivered many tutorials at top conferences. He has received Best Paper awards from TCAD, ICCAD, DAC, ISQED, ICCD and SEMICON, authored invited papers to ISSCC, IEDM, IRPS, ISLPED, HOTCHIPS, and CICC. He has given Keynote and Plenary presentations at Sasimi, ESSCIRC, BMAS, SISPAD, SEMICON, VLSI-SOC, PATMOS, NMI, ASAP, GLVLSI, TAU, and ISVLSI. He is an IEEE Fellow,  a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, a member of the ACM and the AAAS, and an IBM master inventor with more than 50 patents.

Dr. Nassif is the president elect of the IEEE Council on EDA (CEDA), and was the General chair of the ICCAD conference in 2008. He has previously also served on the technical program committee of ICCAD, DAC and ISQED, and on the executive committee of ISPD. He has received the Penrose award (given to one outstanding graduate from the American University of Beirut), the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff award from Bell Labs, two Research Accomplishment Awards from IBM, and the SRC Mahboob-Khan Outstanding Mentor awards from the SRC.

Sani represents IBM on the SRC Science Area Coordinating Committee for CAD and Test, and is the chair for the committee in 2012. He maintains strong ties with academia, and has participated in PhD committees for students from MIT, CMU, Univ. Minnesota, Univ. Texas Austin, UCSB, UCI, Univ. Glasgow, and Univ. Michigan

ICS Seminar: Prof. Michael Perrott

Posted on October 10, 2012

Thursday, October 11, 2012

6:00-8:00pm
ACE 2.402

First Talk Abstract:

VCO-based quantizers take advantage of the steadily increasing speed of modern CMOS processes by quantizing time rather than amplitude. Their implementation leads to highly digital architectures that benefit directly from Moore’s law, and offer intriguing benefits such as inherent shaping of their quantization noise. In this talk, we examine their potential for achieving high resolution analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), and identify key shortcomings such as nonlinearity of the voltage-to-frequency characteristic and its impact on SNDR. Circuit techniques are then presented to overcome such shortcomings, along with recent results verifying their effectiveness. In particular, we show that using phase rather than frequency within a continuous-time Sigma-Delta ADC topology enables 78dB SNDR performance within 20MHz bandwidth with a power efficiency of 330 fJ/conversion step. Finally, we conclude by generalizing the VCO-based quantizer as an efficient combination of a voltage-to-time converter and a time-to-digital converter, and discuss its advantages compared to other recent approaches which combine these components.

Second Talk Abstract:

This talk presents a MEMS-based programmable oscillator which achieves better than +/-0.5ppm frequency stability from -40 degrees C to 85 degrees C and less than 1ps (rms) integrated phase noise (12kHz to 20MHz). We focus on the key component of this system, which is a thermistor-based temperature-to-digital converter (TDC) that enables accurate and low noise compensation of temperature-induced variation of the MEMS resonant frequency. The TDC utilizes several circuit techniques including a high resolution, tunable reference resistor based on a switched capacitor network and fractional-N frequency division, a switched resistor measurement approach which allows a pulsed bias technique for reduced noise, and a VCO-based quantizer for digitization of the temperature signal. To verify the effectiveness of these techniques, measured performance of a 180nm CMOS IC with co-packaged MEMS die is presented which demonstrates 0.1mK (rms) resolution for the TDC within a 5Hz bandwidth and power consumption of 3.97mA with 3.3V supply.

Biography:

Michael H. Perrott received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1997, respectively. From 1997 to 1998, he worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, on high speed circuit techniques for Sigma-Delta synthesizers. In 1999, he was a visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From 1999 to 2001, he worked at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX, and developed circuit and signal processing techniques to achieve high performance clock and data recovery circuits. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2008. He was with SiTime Corporation from 2008 to 2010, where he developed key technology for MEMS-based oscillators. He is currently a professor at Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, where he is focusing on low power, mixed-signal circuits for health and fitness and other applications.

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