DESIGN AUTOMATION FOR CARBON NANOTUBE CIRCUITS CONSIDERING PERFORMANCE AND SECURITY OPTIMIZATION

As prevailing copper interconnect technology advances to its fundamental physical limit, interconnect delay due to ever-increasing wire resistivity has greatly limited the circuit miniaturization. Carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects have emerged as promising replacement materials for copper interconnects due to their superior conductivity. Buffer insertion for CNT interconnects is capable of improving circuit timing of signal nets with limited buffer deployment. However, due to the imperfection of fabricating long straight CNT, there exist significant unidimensional-spatially correlated variations on the critical CNT geometric parameters such as the diameter and density, which will affect the circuit performance. This dissertation develops a novel timing driven buffer insertion technique considering unidimensional correlations of variations of CNT. Although the fabrication variations of CNTs are not desired for the circuit designs targeting performance optimization and reliability, these inherent imperfections make them natural candidates for building highly secure physical unclonable function (PUF), which is an advanced hardware security technology. A novel CNT PUF design through leveraging Lorenz chaotic system is developed and we show that it is resistant to many machine learning modeling attacks. In summary, the studies in this dissertation demonstrate that CNT technology is highly promising for performance and security optimizations in advanced VLSI circuit design

A Holistic Solution for Reliability of 3D Parallel Systems

As device scaling slows down, emerging technologies such as 3D integration and carbon nanotube field-effect transistors are among the most promising solutions to increase device density and performance. These emerging technologies offer shorter interconnects, higher performance, and lower power. However, higher levels of operating temperatures and current densities project significantly higher failure rates. Moreover, due to the infancy of the manufacturing process, high variation, and defect densities, chip designers are not encouraged to consider these emerging technologies as a stand-alone replacement for Silicon-based transistors. The goal of this dissertation is to introduce new architectural and circuit techniques that can work around high-fault rates in the emerging 3D technologies, improving performance and reliability comparable to Silicon. We propose a new holistic approach to the reliability problem that addresses the necessary aspects of an effective solution such as detection, diagnosis, repair, and prevention synergically for a practical solution. By leveraging 3D fabric layouts, it proposes the underlying architecture to efficiently repair the system in the presence of faults. This thesis presents a fault detection scheme by re-executing instructions on idle identical units that distinguishes between transient and permanent faults while localizing it to the granularity of a pipeline stage. Furthermore, with the use of a dynamic and adaptive reconfiguration policy based on activity factors and temperature variation, we propose a framework that delivers a significant improvement in lifetime management to prevent faults due to aging. Finally, a design framework that can be used for large-scale chip production while mitigating yield and variation failures to bring up Carbon Nano Tube-based technology is presented. The proposed framework is capable of efficiently supporting high-variation technologies by providing protection against manufacturing defects at different granularities: module and pipeline-stage levels.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/168118/1/javadb_1.pd

Biomedical Engineering

Biomedical engineering is currently relatively wide scientific area which has been constantly bringing innovations with an objective to support and improve all areas of medicine such as therapy, diagnostics and rehabilitation. It holds a strong position also in natural and biological sciences. In the terms of application, biomedical engineering is present at almost all technical universities where some of them are targeted for the research and development in this area. The presented book brings chosen outputs and results of research and development tasks, often supported by important world or European framework programs or grant agencies. The knowledge and findings from the area of biomaterials, bioelectronics, bioinformatics, biomedical devices and tools or computer support in the processes of diagnostics and therapy are defined in a way that they bring both basic information to a reader and also specific outputs with a possible further use in research and development

Adaptive Distributed Architectures for Future Semiconductor Technologies.

Year after year semiconductor manufacturing has been able to integrate more components in a single computer chip. These improvements have been possible through systematic shrinking in the size of its basic computational element, the transistor. This trend has allowed computers to progressively become faster, more efficient and less expensive. As this trend continues, experts foresee that current computer designs will face new challenges, in utilizing the minuscule devices made available by future semiconductor technologies. Today's microprocessor designs are not fit to overcome these challenges, since they are constrained by their inability to handle component failures by their lack of adaptability to a wide range of custom modules optimized for specific applications and by their limited design modularity. The focus of this thesis is to develop original computer architectures, that can not only survive these new challenges, but also leverage the vast number of transistors available to unlock better performance and efficiency. The work explores and evaluates new software and hardware techniques to enable the development of novel adaptive and modular computer designs. The thesis first explores an infrastructure to quantitatively assess the fallacies of current systems and their inadequacy to operate on unreliable silicon. In light of these findings, specific solutions are then proposed to strengthen digital system architectures, both through hardware and software techniques. The thesis culminates with the proposal of a radically new architecture design that can fully adapt dynamically to operate on the hardware resources available on chip, however limited or abundant those may be.PHDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102405/1/apellegr_1.pd

Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program FY 2004 Annual Report

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program reports its status to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in March of each year. The program operates under the authority of DOE Order 413.2A, 'Laboratory Directed Research and Development' (January 8, 2001), which establishes DOE's requirements for the program while providing the Laboratory Director broad flexibility for program implementation. LDRD funds are obtained through a charge to all Laboratory programs. This report describes all ORNL LDRD research activities supported during FY 2004 and includes final reports for completed projects and shorter progress reports for projects that were active, but not completed, during this period. The FY 2004 ORNL LDRD Self-Assessment (ORNL/PPA-2005/2) provides financial data about the FY 2004 projects and an internal evaluation of the program's management process. ORNL is a DOE multiprogram science, technology, and energy laboratory with distinctive capabilities in materials science and engineering, neutron science and technology, energy production and end-use technologies, biological and environmental science, and scientific computing. With these capabilities ORNL conducts basic and applied research and development (R&D) to support DOE's overarching national security mission, which encompasses science, energy resources, environmental quality, and national nuclear security. As a national resource, the Laboratory also applies its capabilities and skills to the specific needs of other federal agencies and customers through the DOE Work For Others (WFO) program. Information about the Laboratory and its programs is available on the Internet at <http://www.ornl.gov/>. LDRD is a relatively small but vital DOE program that allows ORNL, as well as other multiprogram DOE laboratories, to select a limited number of R&D projects for the purpose of: (1) maintaining the scientific and technical vitality of the Laboratory; (2) enhancing the Laboratory's ability to address future DOE missions; (3) fostering creativity and stimulating exploration of forefront science and technology; (4) serving as a proving ground for new research; and (5) supporting high-risk, potentially high-value R&D. Through LDRD the Laboratory is able to improve its distinctive capabilities and enhance its ability to conduct cutting-edge R&D for its DOE and WFO sponsors. To meet the LDRD objectives and fulfill the particular needs of the Laboratory, ORNL has established a program with two components: the Director's R&D Fund and the Seed Money Fund. As outlined in Table 1, these two funds are complementary. The Director's R&D Fund develops new capabilities in support of the Laboratory initiatives, while the Seed Money Fund is open to all innovative ideas that have the potential for enhancing the Laboratory's core scientific and technical competencies. Provision for multiple routes of access to ORNL LDRD funds maximizes the likelihood that novel and seminal ideas with scientific and technological merit will be recognized and supported

Buffering single-walled carbon nanotubes bundle interconnects for timing optimization

© 2014 IEEE. As prevailing copper interconnect technology advances to its fundamental physical limit, interconnect delay due to ever-increasing wire resistivity has greatly limited the circuit miniaturization. Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) bundle interconnects have emerged as a promising replacement material for copper interconnects due to their superior conductivity. Previous works have focused on studying device and interconnect modeling for bundled SWCNTs while none of them consider deployment of such an advanced technology into VLSI physical design. To the best of the authors\u27 knowledge, this paper develops the first physical design technique for the interconnect optimization using carbon nanotube interconnects. We propose a timing driven buffer insertion technique for bundled SWCNTs, where the standard buffering algorithm has been enhanced to accommodate some features in the SWCNT timing modelling. Our experimental results on a set of scaled industrial nets at 22nm technology demonstrate that compared to copper buffering, CNT buffering can save over 50% buffer area with the same timing constraint. In addition, CNT buffering can effectively reduce the delay by up to 32%. Further, CNT buffering runs in time similar to copper buffering

2009 Annual Progress Report: DOE Hydrogen Program

This report summarizes the hydrogen and fuel cell R&D activities and accomplishments of the DOE Hydrogen Program for FY2009. It covers the program areas of hydrogen production and delivery; fuel cells; manufacturing; technology validation; safety, codes and standards; education; and systems analysis

The International Linear Collider Technical Design Report - Volume 4: Detectors

The International Linear Collider Technical Design Report (TDR) describes in four volumes the physics case and the design of a 500 GeV centre-of-mass energy linear electron-positron collider based on superconducting radio-frequency technology using Niobium cavities as the accelerating structures. The accelerator can be extended to 1 TeV and also run as a Higgs factory at around 250 GeV and on the Z0 pole. A comprehensive value estimate of the accelerator is give, together with associated uncertainties. It is shown that no significant technical issues remain to be solved. Once a site is selected and the necessary site-dependent engineering is carried out, construction can begin immediately. The TDR also gives baseline documentation for two high-performance detectors that can share the ILC luminosity by being moved into and out of the beam line in a "push-pull" configuration. These detectors, ILD and SiD, are described in detail. They form the basis for a world-class experimental programme that promises to increase significantly our understanding of the fundamental processes that govern the evolution of the Universe.Comment: See also http://www.linearcollider.org/ILC/TDR . The full list of signatories is inside the Repor