|
|
 
|
"Self-Healing" Chips to Result from SRC Teamwork with National Science Foundation, University of Michigan; Even the Weak Semiconductors Survive; Advances Ensure Sustainability, Reliability of Computing Applications
SAN FRANCISCO—(BUSINESS WIRE)—July 25, 2006—
Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's
leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related
technologies, today announced the unprecedented development of chips
that refuse to fail. Joint research by SRC, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and the University of Michigan will focus on analysis
of the future landscape of hard silicon failures and their impact on
non-trivial designs, such as microprocessors and their switch
components. Success by the collaborative research effort of
government, business and academia may provide the key to the future
reliability of smaller semiconductor designs.
"In this project, we'll go much further than before by designing
chips that can diagnose when components wear out and heal themselves
on the fly," said Sankar Basu, program director at NSF. "The
bolstering of scientific underpinnings of computing is extremely
important to the NSF. This issue of ensuring reliability is critical
to the future of high-performance computing for even the most
aggressive of applications."
Current industry efforts to make chips more reliable, through
redundancy and other traditional means, involve both higher costs and
the sacrifice of the speed that consumers have come to expect in
nearly all electronics, from servers to cell phones to transportation.
In comparison, results from today's announcement of collaborative
research are projected to provide defect-tolerant designs that will
increase product lifetime through components that take longer to fail.
Without innovative approaches to address in-field silicon failures,
product lifetime will become dangerously short.
"The aim is for chips that won't fail. That will be a first for
the industry. The ramifications of increasing the reliability of the
microprocessor in computing applications like planes, trains and
automobiles is something we get very excited about," said William
Joyner, SRC's director of Computer-Aided Design and Test for the
Global Research Collaboration (GRC), a unit of the SRC that is
responsible for narrowing the options for carrying CMOS to its
ultimate limit. He is an IBM assignee to the consortium. "To continue
the performance pace that billions of people have come to expect, we
need more than technology advances. Sustained performance improvements
require a critical coupling between technology and design."
Reliability of complex systems has become increasingly difficult
to model since more factors must be considered, from defects in
circuits and wires on silicon, to failures in the software
applications that the system runs. The research will entail the
development of both straight-forward and intuitive silicon-failure
models, and a fast, accurate reliability modeling infrastructure, that
allow designers to better understand the reliable system design space
and to evaluate the robustness of potential solutions.
"The solution is not to build flawless chips, but architectures
that can survive defects," said Dr. Todd Austin, associate professor
of electrical engineering at University of Michigan and a former Intel
design engineer. Dr. Valeria Bertacco, co-investigator and an
assistant professor at the University of Michigan, adds, "We've not
given up on making semiconductors always correct. Rather, we're facing
up to the looming problem in the chip industry -- smaller switches and
wires don't always work."
Benefits of the research will serve chipmakers and end-users for
communications, computing, aeronautics and aerospace applications,
medical devices, automotive and consumer electronics, and a wide range
of other applications that are dependent on silicon's correct
performance.
Today's announcement is the result of rigorous competition over
many months under the SRC-GRC's Computer-Aided Design and Test Thrust.
SRC and NSF selected the University of Michigan's team to fund for
three years. SRC facilitates semiconductor research among its
community of 23 companies and partners and 100 universities worldwide.
About SRC
As the pioneer of collaborative research for the semiconductor
industry, SRC defines industry needs, invests in and manages the
research that gives its members a competitive advantage in the dynamic
global marketplace. SRC expands the industry knowledge base and
attracts premier students to help innovate and transfer semiconductor
technology to the commercial industry. Established in 1982, SRC is
based in Research Triangle Park, NC, and drives long-term
semiconductor research contracts on behalf of its participating
members: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Applied Materials, Inc.,
Axcelis Technologies, Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Freescale
Semiconductor, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., LSI
Logic Corp., Mentor Graphics Corp., The Mitre Corp., Novellus Systems,
Inc., Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials and Texas Instruments Corp.
SRC also seeks to leverage funding from global government agencies.
For more information, visit www.src.org.
Contact:
Semiconductor Research Corporation, Austin
Scott Stevens, 512-413-9540
Email Contact
|
 Be the first to review this article
|
|
