This book discusses the new roles that the VLSI (very-large-scale integration of semiconductor circuits) is taking for the safe, secure, and dependable design and operation of electronic systems. The book consists of three parts. Part I, as a general introduction to this vital topic, describes how electronic systems are designed and tested with particular emphasis on dependability engineering, where the simultaneous assessment of the detrimental outcome of failures and cost of their containment is made. This section also describes the related research project “Dependable VLSI Systems,” in which the editor and authors of the book were involved for 8 years. Part II addresses various threats to the dependability of VLSIs as key systems components, including time-dependent degradations, variations in device characteristics, ionizing radiation, electromagnetic interference, design errors, and tampering, with discussion of technologies to counter those threats. Part III elaborates on the design and test technologies for dependability in such applications as control of robots and vehicles, data processing, and storage in a cloud environment and heterogeneous wireless telecommunications. This book is intended to be used as a reference for engineers who work on the design and testing of VLSI systems with particular attention to dependability. It can be used as a textbook in graduate courses as well. Readers interested in dependable systems from social and industrial–economic perspectives will also benefit from the discussions in this book.

"This book covers aspects of system design and efficient modelling, and also introduces various fault models and fault mechanisms associated with digital circuits integrated into System on Chip (SoC), Multi-Processor System-on Chip (MPSoC) or Network on Chip (NoC)"--

This book is a comprehensive guide to new DFT methods that will show the readers how to design a testable and quality product, drive down test cost, improve product quality and yield, and speed up time-to-market and time-to-volume. Most up-to-date coverage of design for testability. Coverage of industry practices commonly found in commercial DFT tools but not discussed in other books. Numerous, practical examples in each chapter illustrating basic VLSI test principles and DFT architectures.

This monograph is motivated by the challenges faced in designing reliable VLSI systems in modern VLSI processes. The reliable operation of integrated circuits (ICs) has become increasingly dif?cult to achieve in the deep submicron (DSM) era. With continuouslydecreasing device feature sizes, combinedwith lower supply voltages and higher operating frequencies, the noise immunity of VLSI circuits is decreasing alarmingly. Thus, VLSI circuits are becoming more vulnerable to noise effects such as crosstalk, power supply variations, and radiation-inducedsoft errors. Among these noise sources, soft errors(or error caused by radiation particle strikes) have become an increasingly troublesome issue for memory arrays as well as c- binational logic circuits. Also, in the DSM era, process variations are increasing at a signi?cant rate, making it more dif?cult to design reliable VLSI circuits. Hence, it is important to ef?ciently design robust VLSI circuits that are resilient to radiation particle strikes and process variations. The work presented in this research mo- graph presents several analysis and design techniques with the goal of realizing VLSI circuits, which are radiation and process variation tolerant.

Written by the inventors and leading experts of this new field, the book results from the International Symposium on “Atomic Switch: Invention, Practical use and Future Prospects” which took place in Tsukuba, Japan on March 27th - 28th, 2017. The book chapters cover the different trends from the science and technology of atomic switches to their applications like brain-type information processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and completely novel functional electronic nanodevices. The current practical uses of the atomic switch are also described. As compared with the conventional semiconductor transistor switch, the atomic switch is more compact (~1/10) with much lower power consumption (~1/10) and scarcely influenced by strong electromagnetic noise and radiation including cosmic rays in space (~1/100). As such, this book is of interest to researchers, scholars and students willing to explore new materials, to refine the nanofabrication methods and to explore new and efficient device architectures.

This book is intended for readers who are interested in the design of robust and reliable electronic digital systems. The authors cover emerging trends in design of today’s reliable electronic systems which are applicable to safety-critical applications, such as automotive or healthcare electronic systems. The emphasis is on modeling approaches and algorithms for analysis and mitigation of soft errors in nano-scale CMOS digital circuits, using techniques that are the cornerstone of Computer Aided Design (CAD) of reliable VLSI circuits. The authors introduce software tools for analysis and mitigation of soft errors in electronic systems, which can be integrated easily with design flows. In addition to discussing soft error aware analysis techniques for combinational logic, the authors also describe new soft error mitigation strategies targeting commercial digital circuits. Coverage includes novel Soft Error Rate (SER) analysis techniques such as process variation aware SER estimation and GPU accelerated SER analysis techniques, in addition to SER reduction methods such as gate sizing and logic restructuring based SER techniques.