Robust system design with uncertain information

Abstract

New opportunities and challenges in system design are direct consequences of the progress in semiconductor technologies, and are due to the extremely small nature of electronic devices, the extremely large complexity of systems, and the new, unchartered territory set by novel technologies. Reliable on-chip communication will require viewing routing wires as information channels, and systems as micro-networks of components. Signal transmission will face an increasingly more noisy environment, where noise abstracts undesirable effects such as timing variations, cross-talk and interference. Techniques borrowed from networking will be applicable at the chip level, to provide reliable communication over unreliable physical channels. Information encoding, packetization and routing will provide us with a new facet of design, to support reliable data transfer in a noisy environment.