Embedded on-chip reliability: it's a thermal challenge

Abstract

For more than four decades Moore's Law has provided a steady exponential grow where each new technology node provided a win-win situation as shrinking features sizes not only led to more complex circuits but also led to faster and less expensive embedded on-chip systems. As Moore's Law approaches physical limits, though, reliability becomes a severe problem: aging effects like electro migration, NBTI, increased susceptibility against soft errors etc. increasingly jeopardize reliability. The talk starts with an overview of aging and soft error effects and deducts that many reliability-threatening effects are directly or indirectly related to thermal issues. The talk gives some background on thermal issues and also presents effective solutions that scale especially with respect to multi-core systems.