Adaptive Integrated Circuit Design for Variation Resilience and Security

The past few decades witness the burgeoning development of integrated circuit in terms of process technology scaling. Along with the tremendous benefits coming from the scaling, challenges are also presented in various stages. During the design time, the complexity of developing a circuit with millions to billions of smaller size transistors is extended after the variations are taken into account. The difficulty of analyzing these nondeterministic properties makes the allocation scheme of redundant resource hardly work in a cost-efficient way. Besides fabrication variations, analog circuits are suffered from severe performance degradations owing to their physical attributes which are vulnerable to aging effects. As such, the post-silicon calibration approach gains increasing attentions to compensate the performance mismatch. For the user-end applications, additional system failures result from the pirated and counterfeited devices provided by the untrusted semiconductor supply chain. Again analog circuits show their weakness to this threat due to the shortage of piracy avoidance techniques. In this dissertation, we propose three adaptive integrated circuit designs to overcome these challenges respectively. The first one investigates the variability-aware gate implementation with the consideration of the overhead control of adaptivity assignment. This design improves the variation resilience typically for digital circuits while optimizing the power consumption and timing yield. The second design is implemented as a self-validation system for the calibration of diverse analog circuits. The system is completely integrated on chip to enhance the convenience without external assistance. In the last design, a classic analog component is further studied to establish the configurable locking mechanism for analog circuits. The use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories addresses the difficulty of searching the unique unlocking pattern of non-Boolean variables

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022 is a creative-commons ebook that provides a unique 360 degrees overview of quantum technologies from science and technology to geopolitical and societal issues. It covers quantum physics history, quantum physics 101, gate-based quantum computing, quantum computing engineering (including quantum error corrections and quantum computing energetics), quantum computing hardware (all qubit types, including quantum annealing and quantum simulation paradigms, history, science, research, implementation and vendors), quantum enabling technologies (cryogenics, control electronics, photonics, components fabs, raw materials), quantum computing algorithms, software development tools and use cases, unconventional computing (potential alternatives to quantum and classical computing), quantum telecommunications and cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum technologies around the world, quantum technologies societal impact and even quantum fake sciences. The main audience are computer science engineers, developers and IT specialists as well as quantum scientists and students who want to acquire a global view of how quantum technologies work, and particularly quantum computing. This version is an extensive update to the 2021 edition published in October 2021.Comment: 1132 pages, 920 figures, Letter forma