Prof. K.-T. Tim Cheng (from UCSB) gave a talk

On October 9, 2007, Prof. K.-T. Tim Cheng (from University of California, Santa Barbara) gave a talk "Design for Reliability and Robustness - Coping with Increasing Variability and Reliability Concerns".

Abstract: Future hardware systems must have sufficient robustness to cope with failures resulting from the increasing variability and reliability concerns. This requirement not only applies to high-end systems but also becomes a necessity for consumer electronics. Failures due to design bugs, manufacturing defects and variations, and environmental noise are becoming facts to be dealt with, not just problems to be solved. Built-in redundancy to tolerate errors or built-in self-recovery from errors will become necessary to ensure sufficient system yield and reliability. Designing a robust system with spares and self-reconfiguration capability could also alleviate the need for burn-in/stress test in the manufacturing line, which has become extremely costly. For field-reconfigurable hardware with spares, the hardware with infant mortality failures can be reconfigured in the field by using the error-free spares to improve reliability and lengthen the life cycle. For high-precision and high-performance analog functions, incorporating a self-tuning capability could compensate variations and dynamically adapt to environmental noise and transient errors. It would require on-chip sensors to sense errors and, in turn, tune the functions to minimize the errors. The component must incorporate in the design some tuning "knobs" which will take instructions from the sensors for self-tuning. Such an approach can boost the precision of an intrinsically imprecise operation under a wide range of variations and noise.

Bio: Prof. Cheng is currently Professor and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He was the founding director of UCSB's Computer Engineering program. His current research interests include design validation, verification, testing and multimedia computing. He has published over 250 technical papers, co-authored three books and holds nine U.S. Patents in these areas. He has also been working closely with US industry and government agencies for projects in these areas. Prof. Cheng is a fellow of IEEE, For more details, please visit http://cadlab.ece.ucsb.edu/.