As technology scales, variability will continue to become worse. Random dopant fluctuations, sub-wavelength lithography, and dynamic variations due to circuit behavior will look like inherent unreliability in the design. Increasing soft errors will increase intermittent error rate by almost two orders of magnitude. As transistors scale even further, degradation due to aging will become worse. We discuss these effects and propose solutions in microarchitecture, design, and testing, for designing with billions of unreliable components to yield predictable and reliable systems, with probabilistic and statistical design methodology.
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Borkar, S. (2008). Probabilistic amp; Statistical Design—the Wave of the Future. In: De Micheli, G., Mir, S., Reis, R. (eds) VLSI-SoC: Research Trends in VLSI and Systems on Chip. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 249. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74909-9_5
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