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Eric Schneider

Name:

Dipl.-Inf. Eric Schneider

Address:

University of Stuttgart

Institute of Computer Architecture and Computer Engineering

Pfaffenwaldring 47

D-70569 Stuttgart

Room:

2.171

Phone:

+49-711-685-88-370

E-Mail:

schneiec at iti dot uni-stuttgart dot de

Public key:

545E 43FB 704F 0E35 84BD 802A F635 EBEF 9FCE 2CEF

Short-Bio

Eric Schneider received the diploma degree in computer science (Dipl.-Inf.) from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2012. There he joined the Institute of Computer Architecture and Computer Engineering (ITI), where he is currently working towards his Ph.D. His research interests include circuit test and simulation, delay test, power simulation, fault diagnosis, process/parameter variations, as well as modeling and parallel programming on general purpose programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate design and test validation and diagnosis tasks; also FPGAs. He is a Student Member of the IEEE since 2014.

Projects

Contributions to ongoing and completed projects:

FAST – Reliability Assessment using „Faster-than-at-Speed Test“

Project Page: FAST – Reliability Assessment using „Faster-than-at-Speed Test“

An important problem in modern technology nodes in nano-electronics are early life failures, which often cause recalls of shipped products and incur high costs.  An important root cause of such failures are marginal circuit structures, which pass a conventional manufacturing test, but are not able to cope with the later workload and stress in the field.  Such structures can be identified on the basis of non-functional indicators, in particular by testing the timing behavior.  For an effective and cost-efficient test of these indicators, the FAST project investigates novel scan designs and built-in self-test strategies for circuits, which can operate at frequencies beyond the functional specification to detect small deviations of the nominal timing behavior and thus potential early life failures.

since 2.2017, DFG-Project: WU 245/19-1   

HiPS: High-Performance Simulation for High Quality Small Delay Fault Testing

Project page: High-Performance Simulation (HiPS) for High Quality Small Delay Fault Testing

Project partner:  Department of Creative Informatics - Kyushu Institute of Technology

This project aims to find novel abstraction and algorithm mapping methods to allow highly accurate timing and NFP-aware simulation of multi-million gate circuits on data-parallel architectures such as graphics processing units (GPUs). The expected dramatic speedup compared to the existing state-of-the-art allows fault simulation of millions of faults and thousands of patterns. The increased accuracy of the simulation results allow to optimize test patterns w.r.t. test power and small delay defect coverage in presence of power noise, clock skew or even circuit variations.

01.2015 - 12.2016, DAAD/JSPS PPP Japan Project: #57155440  

PARSIVAL: Parallel High-Throughput Simulations for Efficient Nanoelectronic Design and Test Validation

Project page: PARSIVAL: Parallel High-Throughput Simulations for Efficient Nanoelectronic Design and Test Validation

Design and test validation is one of the most important and complex tasks within modern semi-conductor product development cycles. The design validation process analyzes and assesses a developed design with respect to certain validation targets to ensure its compliance with given specifications and customer requirements. Test validation evaluates the defect coverage obtained by certain test strategies and assesses the quality of the products tested and delivered. The validation targets include both, functional and non-functional properties, as well as the complex interactions and interdependencies between them. The validation means rely mainly on compute-intensive simulations which require more and more highly parallel hardware acceleration.

In this project novel methods for versatile simulation-based VLSI design and test validation on high throughput data-parallel architectures will be developed, which enable a wide range of important state-of-the-art validation tasks for large circuits. In general, due to the nature of the design validation processes and due to the massive amount of data involved, parallelism and throughput-optimization are the keys for making design validation feasible for future industrial-sized designs. The main focus and key features lie in the structure of the simulation model, the abstraction level and the used algorithms, as well as their parallelization on data-parallel architectures. The simulation algorithms should be kept simple to run fast, yet accurate enough to produce acceptable and valuable data for cross-layer validation of complex digital systems.

since 10.2014, DFG-Project: WU 245/16-1    

ACCESS: Verification, Test, and Diagnosis of Advanced Scan Infrastructures

Project page: ACCESS: Verification, Test, and Diagnosis of Advanced Scan Infrastructures

VLSI designs incorporate specialized instrumentation for post-silicon validation and debug, volume test and diagnosis, as well as in-field system maintenance. Due to the increasing complexity, however, the embedded infrastructure and flexible access mechanisms such as Reconfigurable Scan Networks (RSNs) themselves become a dependability bottleneck.

While efficient verification, test, and diagnosis techniques exist for combinational and some classes of sequential circuits, Reconfigurable Scan Networks (RSNs) still pose a serious challenge. RSNs are controlled via a serial interface and exhibit deeply sequential behavior (cf. IJTAG, IEEE P1687). Due to complex combinational and sequential dependencies, RSNs are beyond the capabilities of existing algorithms for verification, test, and diagnosis which were developed for classical, non-reconfigurable scan networks. The goal of ACCESS is to establish a methodology for efficient verification, test and diagnosis of RSNs to meet stringent reliability, safety and security goals.

since 08.2014, DFG-Project: WU 245/17-1    

OTERA: Online Test Strategies for Reliable Reconfigurable Architectures

Project page: Online Test Strategies for Reliable Reconfigurable Architectures

Dynamically reconfigurable architectures enable a major acceleration of diverse applications by changing and optimizing the structure of the system at runtime. Permanent and transient faults threaten the correct operation of such an architecture. This project aims to increase dependability of runtime reconfigurable systems by a novel system-level strategy for online tests and online adaptation to an impaired state. This will be achieved by (a) scheduling such that tests for reconfigurable resources are executed with minimal performance impact, (b) resource management such that partially faulty resources are used for components which do not require the faulty elements, and (c) online monitoring and error checking. To ensure reliable runtime reconfiguration, each reconfiguration process is thoroughly tested by a novel and efficient combination of online structural and functional tests. Compared to existing fault-tolerance approaches, our proposal avoids the large hardware overhead of structural redundancy schemes. The saved resources are available for further application acceleration. Still, the proposed scheme covers faults in the fabric, in the reconfigured application logic and errors in the process of reconfiguration. 

10.2010 - 06.2017, DFG-Project: WU 245/10-1, 10-2, 10-3   

REALTEST: Test and Reliability of nanoelectronic Systems



Project page: Test and Reliability of nanoelectronic Systems

In nanoelectronic circuit technology, circuits exhibit a high susceptibility to soft errors not only in memory arrays, but also in memory elements in random logic. Consequently, a goal of this project is the development of an efficient soft error protection scheme that uses both time and space redundancy.

01.2006 - 07.2013, DFG-Project: WU 245/5-1, 5-2    

Student Theses
  • Systematische Charakterisierung zur Parametrisierung von Simulationen auf Switch-Ebene
    (Bachelor Thesis)

    Bussmann, S.
    Oct. 9, 2017 - Apr. 9, 2018.
  • Frequency Optimization for Hidden Delay Fault Testing with Monitor Reuse Framework
    (Master Thesis)

    Hu, X.
    Aug. 22, 2017 - Feb. 21, 2018.
  • Hochbeschleunigte IR-Drop Analyse  von integrierten Schaltungen
    (Bachelor Thesis)

    Hagemann, P.
    Mar. 1 - Oct. 6, 2017.
  • Inter-gate Fault Modeling for GPU-accelerated Fault Simulation
    (Master Thesis
    - Nr. 00731-005)
    Frosi, A.
    May 25 - Nov. 24, 2016.
  • Realistic Gate Model for efficient Timing Analysis of very deep submicron CMOS circuits
    (Master Thesis
    - Nr. 00731-001)
    Murali, D.

    Sep. 14, 2015 - Mar. 15, 2016.
  • Switching activity based estimation of IR-drop
    (Projekt INF)
    Hardes, D., Hagemann, P., Knabben, M.
    Feb. 5 - Aug. 7, 2015.
  • Adaptierung an Zeitverhalten-Variationen in rekonfigurierbaren Hardwarestrukturen
    (Bachelor Thesis - Nr. 179)

    Brandhofer, S.
    Oct. 20, 2014 - Apr. 20, 2015.
  • Analysis of Hardware-Accelerated Applications in Reconfigurable Network-on-a-Chip Based Systems
    (Projekt INF)
    Brandhofer, S., Göttlich, P., Lanksweirt, A.
    Jun. 1 - Dec. 1, 2014.
Current Topics

Sorry, no available topics at the moment.

Publications

Books and Book Chapters
Matching entries: 0
settings...
2. Online Test Strategies and Optimizations for Reliable Reconfigurable Architectures
Bauer, Lars; Zhang, Hongyan; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Henkel, Jörg
in Henkel, Jörg; Dutt, Nikil(Ed.)
Dependable Embedded Systems, pp. 277-302
ISBN: 978-3-030-52017-5, Springer International Publishing, 2021
2021
DOI URL  
Abstract: Runtime/reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a promising augment to conventional processor architectures such as Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). Since the reconfigurable parts are typically manufactured in the latest technology, they may suffer from aging and environmentally induced dependability threats. In this chapter, strategic online test methods for dependable runtime-reconfigurable architectures as well as cross-layer optimizations for high reliability and lifetime are developed. Firstly, two orthogonal online tests are proposed that ensure reliable configuration of the reconfigurable fabric and aid fault detection. Secondly, a novel design method called module diversification is presented that enables self-repair of the system in case of faults caused by degradation effects as well as single-event upsets in the configuration. Thirdly, a novel stress-aware placement method is proposed that aims for slowing down system degradation by aging effects. The combined methods ensure reliable operation across architectural and gate level and allow to prolong the lifetime of dependable runtime-reconfigurable architectures.
BibTeX:
@inbook{BauerZKSWH2021,
  author = {Bauer, Lars and Zhang, Hongyan and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Henkel, Jörg},
  editor = {Henkel, Jörg and Dutt, Nikil},
  title = {{Online Test Strategies and Optimizations for Reliable Reconfigurable Architectures}},
  booktitle = {Dependable Embedded Systems},
  publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
  year = {2021},
  pages = {277--302},
  abstract = {Runtime/reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a promising augment to conventional processor architectures such as Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). Since the reconfigurable parts are typically manufactured in the latest technology, they may suffer from aging and environmentally induced dependability threats. In this chapter, strategic online test methods for dependable runtime-reconfigurable architectures as well as cross-layer optimizations for high reliability and lifetime are developed. Firstly, two orthogonal online tests are proposed that ensure reliable configuration of the reconfigurable fabric and aid fault detection. Secondly, a novel design method called module diversification is presented that enables self-repair of the system in case of faults caused by degradation effects as well as single-event upsets in the configuration. Thirdly, a novel stress-aware placement method is proposed that aims for slowing down system degradation by aging effects. The combined methods ensure reliable operation across architectural and gate level and allow to prolong the lifetime of dependable runtime-reconfigurable architectures.},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52017-5_12},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52017-5_12}
}
1. Advances in Hardware Reliability of Reconfigurable Many-core Embedded Systems
Bauer, Lars; Zhang, Hongyan; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim.; Henkel, Jörg
in Al-Hashimi, B. M.; Merrett, G. V.(Ed.)
Many-Core Computing: Hardware and software, pp. 395-416
ISBN: 978-1-78561-582-5, Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), 2019
2019
URL  
BibTeX:
@inbook{BauerZKSWH2019,
  author = {Bauer, Lars and Zhang, Hongyan and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim. and Henkel, Jörg},
  editor = {Al-Hashimi, B. M. and Merrett, G. V.},
  title = {{Advances in Hardware Reliability of Reconfigurable Many-core Embedded Systems}},
  booktitle = {Many-Core Computing: Hardware and software},
  publisher = {Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)},
  year = {2019},
  pages = {395--416},
  url = {https://www2.theiet.org/resources/books/computing/many-core-comp.cfm}
}
Created by JabRef on 25/04/2023.
Journals and Conference Proceedings
Matching entries: 0
settings...
23. Switch Level Time Simulation of CMOS Circuits with Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling
Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium (VTS'20), San Diego, US, 5-8 April 2020, pp. 1-6
2020
DOI PDF 
Abstract: Systems with adaptive voltage-and frequency scaling (AVFS) require timing validation with accurate timing models under multiple operating points. Since, these models are typically simulated at logic level and extremely time-consuming, the state-of-the-art often compromises both accuracy and speed. This paper presents the first massively parallel switch level time simulator with parametric delay modeling for efficient timing-accurate validation of systems with AVFS. It provides full glitch-accurate switching activity information of designs under varying supply voltage and temperature. Offline statistical learning with regression analysis is employed to generate polynomials for dynamic delay modeling by approximation of the first-order electrical parameters of CMOS standard cells. With the parallelization on graphics processing units and simultaneous exploitation of multiple dimensions of parallelism the simulation throughput is maximized and scalable-design space exploration of AVFS-based systems is enabled. Results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy with speedups of up to 159x over conventional logic level time simulation with static delays.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneW2020a,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Switch Level Time Simulation of CMOS Circuits with Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium (VTS'20)},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {1--6},
  abstract = {Systems with adaptive voltage-and frequency scaling (AVFS) require timing validation with accurate timing models under multiple operating points. Since, these models are typically simulated at logic level and extremely time-consuming, the state-of-the-art often compromises both accuracy and speed. This paper presents the first massively parallel switch level time simulator with parametric delay modeling for efficient timing-accurate validation of systems with AVFS. It provides full glitch-accurate switching activity information of designs under varying supply voltage and temperature. Offline statistical learning with regression analysis is employed to generate polynomials for dynamic delay modeling by approximation of the first-order electrical parameters of CMOS standard cells. With the parallelization on graphics processing units and simultaneous exploitation of multiple dimensions of parallelism the simulation throughput is maximized and scalable-design space exploration of AVFS-based systems is enabled. Results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy with speedups of up to 159x over conventional logic level time simulation with static delays.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VTS48691.2020.9107642},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2020/VTS_SchneW2020.pdf}
}
22. Using Programmable Delay Monitors for Wear-Out and Early Life Failure Prediction
Liu, Chang; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim.
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation Test in Europe (DATE'20), Grenoble, FR, 9-13 March 2020, pp. 1-6
2020
DOI PDF 
Abstract: Early life failures in marginal devices are a severe reliability threat in current nano-scaled CMOS devices. While small delay faults are an effective indicator of marginalities, their detection requires special efforts in testing by so-called Faster-than-At-Speed Test (FAST). In a similar way, delay degradation is an indicator that a device reaches the wear-out phase due to aging. Programmable delay monitors provide the possibility to detect gradual performance changes in a system and allow to observe device degradation.This paper presents a unified approach to test small delay faults related to wear-out and early-life failures by reuse of existing programmable delay monitors within FAST. The approach is complemented by a test-scheduling which optimally selects frequencies and delay configurations to significantly increase the fault coverage of small delays and to reduce the test time.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{LiuSW2020,
  author = {Liu, Chang and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim.},
  title = {{Using Programmable Delay Monitors for Wear-Out and Early Life Failure Prediction}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation Test in Europe (DATE'20)},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {1--6},
  abstract = {Early life failures in marginal devices are a severe reliability threat in current nano-scaled CMOS devices. While small delay faults are an effective indicator of marginalities, their detection requires special efforts in testing by so-called Faster-than-At-Speed Test (FAST). In a similar way, delay degradation is an indicator that a device reaches the wear-out phase due to aging. Programmable delay monitors provide the possibility to detect gradual performance changes in a system and allow to observe device degradation.This paper presents a unified approach to test small delay faults related to wear-out and early-life failures by reuse of existing programmable delay monitors within FAST. The approach is complemented by a test-scheduling which optimally selects frequencies and delay configurations to significantly increase the fault coverage of small delays and to reduce the test time.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116284},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2020/DATE_LiuSW2020.pdf}
}
21. GPU-accelerated Time Simulation of Systems with Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling
Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation Test in Europe (DATE'20), Grenoble, FR, 9-13 March 2020, pp. 1-6
2020
DOI PDF 
Abstract: Timing validation of systems with adaptive voltage-and frequency scaling (AVFS) requires an accurate timing model under multiple operating points. Simulating such a model at gate level is extremely time-consuming, and the state-of-the-art compromises both accuracy and compute efficiency.This paper presents a method for dynamic gate delay modeling on graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators which is based on polynomial approximation with offline statistical learning using regression analysis. It provides glitch-accurate switching activity information for gates and designs under varying supply voltages with negligible memory and performance impact. Parallelism from the evaluation of operating conditions, gates and stimuli is exploited simultaneously to utilize the high arithmetic computing throughput of GPUs. This way, large-scale design space exploration of AVFS-based systems is enabled. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the presented approach showing speedups of three orders of magnitude over conventional time simulation that supports static delays only.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneW2020,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{GPU-accelerated Time Simulation of Systems with Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation Test in Europe (DATE'20)},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {1--6},
  abstract = {Timing validation of systems with adaptive voltage-and frequency scaling (AVFS) requires an accurate timing model under multiple operating points. Simulating such a model at gate level is extremely time-consuming, and the state-of-the-art compromises both accuracy and compute efficiency.This paper presents a method for dynamic gate delay modeling on graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators which is based on polynomial approximation with offline statistical learning using regression analysis. It provides glitch-accurate switching activity information for gates and designs under varying supply voltages with negligible memory and performance impact. Parallelism from the evaluation of operating conditions, gates and stimuli is exploited simultaneously to utilize the high arithmetic computing throughput of GPUs. This way, large-scale design space exploration of AVFS-based systems is enabled. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the presented approach showing speedups of three orders of magnitude over conventional time simulation that supports static delays only.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116256},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2020/DATE_SchneW2020.pdf}
}
20. Variation-Aware Small Delay Fault Diagnosis on Compressed Test Responses
Holst, Stefan; Schneider, Eric; Kochte, Michael A.; Wen, Xiaoqing; Wunderlich, Hans Joachim
Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'19), Washington DC, USA, 11-15 November 2019
2019
DOI PDF 
Keywords: small delay defect, logic diagnosis, test response compaction, process variation, GP-GPU
Abstract: With today’s tight timing margins, increasing manufacturing variations, and new defect behaviors in FinFETs, effective yield learning requires detailed information on the population of small delay defects in fabricated chips. Small delay fault diagnosis for yield learning faces two principal challenges: (1) production test responses are usually highly compacted reducing the amount of available failure data, and (2) failure signatures not only depend on the actual defect but also on omnipresent and unknown delay variations. This work presents the very first diagnosis algorithm specifically designed to diagnose timing issues on compacted failure data and under process variations. An innovative combination of variation-invariant structural anal- ysis, GPU-accelerated time-simulation, and variation-tolerant syndrome matching for compacted test responses allows the proposed algorithm to cope with both challenges. Experiments on large benchmark circuits clearly demonstrate the scalability and superior accuracy of the new diagnosis approach.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{HolstSKWW2019,
  author = {Holst, Stefan and Schneider, Eric and Kochte, Michael A. and Wen, Xiaoqing and Wunderlich, Hans Joachim},
  title = {{Variation-Aware Small Delay Fault Diagnosis on Compressed Test Responses}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'19)},
  year = {2019},
  keywords = {small delay defect, logic diagnosis, test response compaction, process variation, GP-GPU},
  abstract = {With today’s tight timing margins, increasing manufacturing variations, and new defect behaviors in FinFETs, effective yield learning requires detailed information on the population of small delay defects in fabricated chips. Small delay fault diagnosis for yield learning faces two principal challenges: (1) production test responses are usually highly compacted reducing the amount of available failure data, and (2) failure signatures not only depend on the actual defect but also on omnipresent and unknown delay variations. This work presents the very first diagnosis algorithm specifically designed to diagnose timing issues on compacted failure data and under process variations. An innovative combination of variation-invariant structural anal- ysis, GPU-accelerated time-simulation, and variation-tolerant syndrome matching for compacted test responses allows the proposed algorithm to cope with both challenges. Experiments on large benchmark circuits clearly demonstrate the scalability and superior accuracy of the new diagnosis approach.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITC44170.2019.9000143},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2019/ITC_HolstSKWW2019.pdf}
}
19. Built-in Test for Hidden Delay Faults
Kampmann, Matthias; Kochte, Michael A.; Liu, Chang; Schneider, Eric; Hellebrand, Sybille; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Vol. 38(10), 2019, pp. 1956-1968
2019
DOI PDF 
Keywords: Faster-than-at-Speed-Test, BIST, in-field test, reliability
Abstract: Marginal hardware introduces severe reliability threats throughout the life cycle of a system. Although marginalities may not affect the functionality of a circuit immediately after manufacturing, they can degrade into hard failures and must be screened out during manufacturing test to prevent early life failures. Furthermore, their evolution in the field must be proactively monitored by periodic tests before actual failures occur. In recent years small delay faults have gained increasing attention as possible indicators of marginal hardware. However, small delay faults on short paths may be undetectable even with advanced timing aware ATPG. Faster- than-at-speed test (FAST) can detect such hidden delay faults, but so far FAST has mainly been restricted to manufacturing test. This paper presents a fully autonomous built-in self-test (BIST) approach for FAST, which supports in-field testing by appropriate strategies for test generation and response compac- tion. In particular, the required test frequencies for hidden delay fault detection are selected, such that hardware overhead and test time are minimized. Furthermore, test response compaction handles the large number of unknowns (X-values) on long paths by storing intermediate MISR-signatures in a small on-chip memory for later analysis using X-canceling transformations. A comprehensive experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented approach. In particular, the impact of the considered fault size is studied in detail.
BibTeX:
@article{KampmKLSHW2018,
  author = {Kampmann, Matthias and Kochte, Michael A. and Liu, Chang and Schneider, Eric and Hellebrand, Sybille and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Built-in Test for Hidden Delay Faults}},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)},
  year = {2019},
  volume = {38},
  number = {10},
  pages = {1956--1968},
  keywords = {Faster-than-at-Speed-Test, BIST, in-field test, reliability},
  abstract = {Marginal hardware introduces severe reliability threats throughout the life cycle of a system. Although marginalities may not affect the functionality of a circuit immediately after manufacturing, they can degrade into hard failures and must be screened out during manufacturing test to prevent early life failures. Furthermore, their evolution in the field must be proactively monitored by periodic tests before actual failures occur. In recent years small delay faults have gained increasing attention as possible indicators of marginal hardware. However, small delay faults on short paths may be undetectable even with advanced timing aware ATPG. Faster- than-at-speed test (FAST) can detect such hidden delay faults, but so far FAST has mainly been restricted to manufacturing test. This paper presents a fully autonomous built-in self-test (BIST) approach for FAST, which supports in-field testing by appropriate strategies for test generation and response compac- tion. In particular, the required test frequencies for hidden delay fault detection are selected, such that hardware overhead and test time are minimized. Furthermore, test response compaction handles the large number of unknowns (X-values) on long paths by storing intermediate MISR-signatures in a small on-chip memory for later analysis using X-canceling transformations. A comprehensive experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented approach. In particular, the impact of the considered fault size is studied in detail.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2018.2864255},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2019/TCAD_KampmKLSHW2019.pdf}
}
18. SWIFT: Switch Level Fault Simulation on GPUs
Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Vol. 38(1), January 2019, pp. 122-135
2019
DOI PDF 
Keywords: parallel simulation, fault simulation, switch level, parametric faults, complex gates, variation analysis, GPU
Abstract: Current nanometer CMOS circuits show an increasing sensitivity to deviations in first-order parameters and suffer from process variations during manufacturing. To properly assess and support test validation of digital designs, low-level fault simulation approaches are utilized to accurately capture the behavior of CMOS cells under parametric faults and process variations as early as possible throughout the design phase. However, low-level simulation approaches exhibit a high computational complexity, especially when variation has to be taken into account. In this work a high-throughput parallel fault simulation at switch level is presented. First-order electrical parameters are utilized to capture CMOS-specific functional and timing behavior of complex cells allowing to model faults with transistor granularity and without the need of logic abstraction. Furthermore, variation modeling in cells and transistor devices enables broad and efficient variation analyses of faults over many circuit instances for the first time. The simulation approach utilizes massive parallelization on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by exploiting parallelism from cells, stimuli, faults and circuit instances. Despite the lower abstraction levels of the approach, it processes designs with millions of gates and outperforms conventional fault simulation at logic level in terms of speed and accuracy.
BibTeX:
@article{SchneW2018,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{SWIFT: Switch Level Fault Simulation on GPUs}},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)},
  year = {2019},
  volume = {38},
  number = {1},
  pages = {122--135},
  keywords = {parallel simulation, fault simulation, switch level, parametric faults, complex gates, variation analysis, GPU},
  abstract = {Current nanometer CMOS circuits show an increasing sensitivity to deviations in first-order parameters and suffer from process variations during manufacturing. To properly assess and support test validation of digital designs, low-level fault simulation approaches are utilized to accurately capture the behavior of CMOS cells under parametric faults and process variations as early as possible throughout the design phase. However, low-level simulation approaches exhibit a high computational complexity, especially when variation has to be taken into account. In this work a high-throughput parallel fault simulation at switch level is presented. First-order electrical parameters are utilized to capture CMOS-specific functional and timing behavior of complex cells allowing to model faults with transistor granularity and without the need of logic abstraction. Furthermore, variation modeling in cells and transistor devices enables broad and efficient variation analyses of faults over many circuit instances for the first time. The simulation approach utilizes massive parallelization on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by exploiting parallelism from cells, stimuli, faults and circuit instances. Despite the lower abstraction levels of the approach, it processes designs with millions of gates and outperforms conventional fault simulation at logic level in terms of speed and accuracy.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2018.2802871},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2018/TCAD_SchneW2018.pdf}
}
17. Multi-Level Timing and Fault Simulation on GPUs
Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
INTEGRATION, the VLSI Journal -- Special Issue of ASP-DAC 2018
Vol. 64, January 2019, pp. 78-91
2019
DOI URL PDF 
Keywords: Parallel fault simulation, Multi-level, Transistor faults, Waveform accurate, GPUs
Abstract: In CMOS technology first-order parametric faults during manufacturing can exhibit severe changes in the timing as well as in the functional behavior of cells. Since these faults are hard to detect by conventional tests, the accurate simulation of these low-level faults plays an important role for test validation. However, pure low-level fault simulation approaches impose a high computational complexity that can quickly become inapplicable to larger simulation problems due to limitations in scalability. In this paper, the first parallel multi-level fault simulation approach on graphics processing units (GPUs) is presented. The approach utilizes both logic level and switch level descriptions concurrently in a mixed-abstraction timing simulation. The abstraction is lowered in user-defined so-called regions of interest that locally increase the modeling accuracy enabling low-level first-order parametric fault injection. Resulting signal waveforms are transformed between the different abstractions transparently. This way a fast, versatile and efficient multi-level fault simulation approach on GPUs is created that scales for designs with millions of cells while achieving high simulation throughput with runtime savings of up to 84% compared to full switch level simulations.
BibTeX:
@article{SchneW2018a,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Multi-Level Timing and Fault Simulation on GPUs}},
  journal = {INTEGRATION, the VLSI Journal -- Special Issue of ASP-DAC 2018},
  year = {2019},
  volume = {64},
  pages = {78--91},
  keywords = {Parallel fault simulation, Multi-level, Transistor faults, Waveform accurate, GPUs},
  abstract = {In CMOS technology first-order parametric faults during manufacturing can exhibit severe changes in the timing as well as in the functional behavior of cells. Since these faults are hard to detect by conventional tests, the accurate simulation of these low-level faults plays an important role for test validation. However, pure low-level fault simulation approaches impose a high computational complexity that can quickly become inapplicable to larger simulation problems due to limitations in scalability. In this paper, the first parallel multi-level fault simulation approach on graphics processing units (GPUs) is presented. The approach utilizes both logic level and switch level descriptions concurrently in a mixed-abstraction timing simulation. The abstraction is lowered in user-defined so-called regions of interest that locally increase the modeling accuracy enabling low-level first-order parametric fault injection. Resulting signal waveforms are transformed between the different abstractions transparently. This way a fast, versatile and efficient multi-level fault simulation approach on GPUs is created that scales for designs with millions of cells while achieving high simulation throughput with runtime savings of up to 84% compared to full switch level simulations.},
  url = {https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Y2vpcBfIgs7p},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vlsi.2018.08.005},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2018/VLSI_SchneW2018.pdf}
}
16. Extending Aging Monitors for Early Life and Wear-out Failure Prevention
Liu, Chang; Schneider, Eric; Kampmann, Matthias; Hellebrand, Sybille; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'18), Hefei, Anhui, China, 15-18 October 2018, pp. 92-97
2018
DOI PDF 
Keywords: Faster-than-at-speed test, small delay faults, aging monitors
Abstract: Aging monitors can indicate the wear-out phase of a semi-conductor device before it will actually fail, and allow the use of integrated circuits in applications with high safety and reliability demands. In the early phase of the lifecycle of integrated systems, small delay faults may indicate reliability problems and early life failures, even if they are smaller than the slack of any path and neither alter the functional behavior of a system nor violate any aging guardband. One option to detect this type of hidden delay faults (HDFs) is the application of a faster-than-at-speed-test (FAST). This paper shows that aging monitors can be extended at low cost to achieve high HDF test coverage with a reduction in test time during FAST. The result is a unified strategy to improve the reliability in both early and late phases of the system lifecycle.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{LiuSKHW2018,
  author = {Liu, Chang and Schneider, Eric and Kampmann, Matthias and Hellebrand, Sybille and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Extending Aging Monitors for Early Life and Wear-out Failure Prevention}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'18)},
  year = {2018},
  pages = {92--97},
  keywords = {Faster-than-at-speed test, small delay faults, aging monitors},
  abstract = {Aging monitors can indicate the wear-out phase of a semi-conductor device before it will actually fail, and allow the use of integrated circuits in applications with high safety and reliability demands. In the early phase of the lifecycle of integrated systems, small delay faults may indicate reliability problems and early life failures, even if they are smaller than the slack of any path and neither alter the functional behavior of a system nor violate any aging guardband. One option to detect this type of hidden delay faults (HDFs) is the application of a faster-than-at-speed-test (FAST). This paper shows that aging monitors can be extended at low cost to achieve high HDF test coverage with a reduction in test time during FAST. The result is a unified strategy to improve the reliability in both early and late phases of the system lifecycle.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2018.00028},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2018/ATS_LiuSKHW2018.pdf}
}
15. Multi-Level Timing Simulation on GPUs
Schneider, Eric; Kochte, Michael A.; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC'18), Jeju Island, Korea, 22-25 January 2018 , pp. 470-475
2018
DOI PDF 
Keywords: timing simulation, switch level, multi-level, parallel simulation, GPUs
Abstract: Timing-accurate simulation of circuits is an important task in design validation of modern nano-scale CMOS circuits. With shrinking technology nodes, detailed simulation models down to transistor level have to be considered. While conventional simulation at logic level lacks the ability to accurately model timing behavior for complex cells, more accurate simulation at lower abstraction levels becomes computationally expensive for larger designs. This work presents the first parallel multi-level waveform-accurate timing simulation approach on graphics processing units (GPUs). The simulation uses logic and switch level abstraction concurrently, thus allowing to combine their advantages by trading off speed and accuracy. The abstraction can be lowered in arbitrary regions of interest to locally increase the accuracy. Waveform transformations allow for transparent switching between the abstraction levels. With the utilization of GPUs and thoughtful unification of algorithms and data structures, a fast and versatile high-throughput multi-level simulation is obtained that is scalable for millions of cells while achieving runtime savings of up to 89% compared to full simulation at switch level.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneKW2018,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Kochte, Michael A. and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Multi-Level Timing Simulation on GPUs}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC'18)},
  year = { 2018 },
  pages = {470--475},
  keywords = {timing simulation, switch level, multi-level, parallel simulation, GPUs},
  abstract = {Timing-accurate simulation of circuits is an important task in design validation of modern nano-scale CMOS circuits. With shrinking technology nodes, detailed simulation models down to transistor level have to be considered. While conventional simulation at logic level lacks the ability to accurately model timing behavior for complex cells, more accurate simulation at lower abstraction levels becomes computationally expensive for larger designs. This work presents the first parallel multi-level waveform-accurate timing simulation approach on graphics processing units (GPUs). The simulation uses logic and switch level abstraction concurrently, thus allowing to combine their advantages by trading off speed and accuracy. The abstraction can be lowered in arbitrary regions of interest to locally increase the accuracy. Waveform transformations allow for transparent switching between the abstraction levels. With the utilization of GPUs and thoughtful unification of algorithms and data structures, a fast and versatile high-throughput multi-level simulation is obtained that is scalable for millions of cells while achieving runtime savings of up to 89% compared to full simulation at switch level.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2018.8297368},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2018/ASPDAC_SchneKW2018.pdf}
}
14. Analysis and Mitigation of IR-Drop Induced Scan Shift-Errors
Holst, Stefan; Schneider, Eric; Kawagoe, Koshi; Kochte, Michael A.; Miyase, Kohei; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Kajihara, Seiji; Wen, Xiaoqing
Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'17), Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 31 October-2 November 2017, pp. 1-8
Distinguished Paper
2017
DOI PDF 
Abstract: Excessive IR-drop during scan shift can cause localized IR-drop around clock buffers and introduce dynamic clock skew. Excessive clock skew at neighboring scan flip-flops results in hold or setup timing violations corrupting test stimuli or test responses during shifting. We introduce a new method to assess the risk of such test data corruption at each scan cycle and flip-flop. The most likely cases of test data corruption are mitigated in a non-intrusive way by selective test data manipulation and masking of affected responses. Evaluation results show the computational feasibility of our method for large benchmark circuits, and demonstrate that a few targeted pattern changes provide large potential gains in shift safety and test time with negligible cost in fault coverage.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{HolstSKKMWKW2017,
  author = {Holst, Stefan and Schneider, Eric and Kawagoe, Koshi and Kochte, Michael A. and Miyase, Kohei and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Kajihara, Seiji and Wen, Xiaoqing},
  title = {{Analysis and Mitigation of IR-Drop Induced Scan Shift-Errors}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'17)},
  year = {2017},
  pages = {1--8},
  abstract = {Excessive IR-drop during scan shift can cause localized IR-drop around clock buffers and introduce dynamic clock skew. Excessive clock skew at neighboring scan flip-flops results in hold or setup timing violations corrupting test stimuli or test responses during shifting. We introduce a new method to assess the risk of such test data corruption at each scan cycle and flip-flop. The most likely cases of test data corruption are mitigated in a non-intrusive way by selective test data manipulation and masking of affected responses. Evaluation results show the computational feasibility of our method for large benchmark circuits, and demonstrate that a few targeted pattern changes provide large potential gains in shift safety and test time with negligible cost in fault coverage.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TEST.2017.8242055},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2017/ITC_HolstSKKMWKW2017.pdf}
}
13. Aging Resilience and Fault Tolerance in Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures
Zhang, Hongyan; Bauer, Lars; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Henkel, Jörg
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Vol. 66(6), 1 June 2017, pp. 957-970
2017
DOI PDF 
Keywords: Runtime reconfiguration, aging mitigation, fault-tolerance, resilience, graceful degradation, FPGA
Abstract: Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) allow area- and power-efficient acceleration of complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability and lifetime of such systems. Aging mitigation and fault tolerance techniques for the reconfigurable fabric become essential to realize dependable reconfigurable architectures. This article presents an accelerator diversification method that creates multiple configurations for runtime reconfigurable accelerators that are diversified in their usage of Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs). In particular, it creates a minimal number of configurations such that all single-CLB and some multi-CLB faults can be tolerated. For each fault we ensure that there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB.
Secondly, a novel runtime accelerator placement algorithm is presented that exploits the diversity in resource usage of these configurations to balance the stress imposed by executions of the accelerators on the reconfigurable fabric. By tracking the stress due to accelerator usage at runtime, the stress is balanced both within a reconfigurable region as well as over all reconfigurable regions of the system. The accelerator placement algorithm also considers faulty CLBs in the regions and selects the appropriate configuration such that the system maintains a high performance in presence of multiple permanent faults.
Experimental results demonstrate that our methods deliver up to 3.7x higher performance in presence of faults at marginal runtime costs and 1.6x higher MTTF than state-of-the-art aging mitigation methods.
BibTeX:
@article{ZhangBKSWH2017,
  author = {Zhang, Hongyan and Bauer, Lars and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Henkel, Jörg},
  title = {{Aging Resilience and Fault Tolerance in Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures}},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computers},
  year = {2017},
  volume = {66},
  number = {6},
  pages = {957--970},
  keywords = {Runtime reconfiguration, aging mitigation, fault-tolerance, resilience, graceful degradation, FPGA},
  abstract = {Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) allow area- and power-efficient acceleration of complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability and lifetime of such systems. Aging mitigation and fault tolerance techniques for the reconfigurable fabric become essential to realize dependable reconfigurable architectures. This article presents an accelerator diversification method that creates multiple configurations for runtime reconfigurable accelerators that are diversified in their usage of Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs). In particular, it creates a minimal number of configurations such that all single-CLB and some multi-CLB faults can be tolerated. For each fault we ensure that there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB.
Secondly, a novel runtime accelerator placement algorithm is presented that exploits the diversity in resource usage of these configurations to balance the stress imposed by executions of the accelerators on the reconfigurable fabric. By tracking the stress due to accelerator usage at runtime, the stress is balanced both within a reconfigurable region as well as over all reconfigurable regions of the system. The accelerator placement algorithm also considers faulty CLBs in the regions and selects the appropriate configuration such that the system maintains a high performance in presence of multiple permanent faults.
Experimental results demonstrate that our methods deliver up to 3.7x higher performance in presence of faults at marginal runtime costs and 1.6x higher MTTF than state-of-the-art aging mitigation methods. }, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TC.2016.2616405}, file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2017/TC_ZhangBKSWH2017.pdf} }
12. GPU-Accelerated Simulation of Small Delay Faults
Schneider, Eric; Kochte, Michael A.; Holst, Stefan; Wen, Xiaoqing; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Vol. 36(5), May 2017, pp. 829-841
2017
DOI PDF 
Keywords: Circuit faults, Computational modeling, Delays, Instruction sets, Integrated circuit modeling, Logic gates, Fault simulation, graphics processing unit (GPU), parallel, process variation, small gate delay faults, timing-accurate, waveform
Abstract: Delay fault simulation is an essential task during test pattern generation and reliability assessment of electronic circuits. With the high sensitivity of current nano-scale designs towards even smallest delay deviations, the simulation of small gate delay faults has become extremely important. Since these faults have a subtle impact on the timing behavior, traditional fault simulation approaches based on abstract timing models are not sufficient. Furthermore, the detection of these faults is compromised by the ubiquitous variations in the manufacturing processes, which causes the actual fault coverage to vary from circuit instance to circuit instance, and makes the use of timing accurate methods mandatory. However, the application of timing accurate techniques quickly becomes infeasible for larger designs due to excessive computational requirements. In this work, we present a method for fast and waveformaccurate simulation of small delay faults on graphics processing units with exceptional computational performance. By exploiting multiple dimensions of parallelism from gates, faults, waveforms and circuit instances, the proposed approach allows for timing-accurate and exhaustive small delay fault simulation under process variation for designs with millions of gates.
BibTeX:
@article{SchneKHWW2016,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Kochte, Michael A. and Holst, Stefan and Wen, Xiaoqing and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{GPU-Accelerated Simulation of Small Delay Faults}},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)},
  year = {2017},
  volume = {36},
  number = {5},
  pages = {829--841},
  keywords = {Circuit faults, Computational modeling, Delays, Instruction sets, Integrated circuit modeling, Logic gates, Fault simulation, graphics processing unit (GPU), parallel, process variation, small gate delay faults, timing-accurate, waveform},
  abstract = {Delay fault simulation is an essential task during test pattern generation and reliability assessment of electronic circuits. With the high sensitivity of current nano-scale designs towards even smallest delay deviations, the simulation of small gate delay faults has become extremely important. Since these faults have a subtle impact on the timing behavior, traditional fault simulation approaches based on abstract timing models are not sufficient. Furthermore, the detection of these faults is compromised by the ubiquitous variations in the manufacturing processes, which causes the actual fault coverage to vary from circuit instance to circuit instance, and makes the use of timing accurate methods mandatory. However, the application of timing accurate techniques quickly becomes infeasible for larger designs due to excessive computational requirements. In this work, we present a method for fast and waveformaccurate simulation of small delay faults on graphics processing units with exceptional computational performance. By exploiting multiple dimensions of parallelism from gates, faults, waveforms and circuit instances, the proposed approach allows for timing-accurate and exhaustive small delay fault simulation under process variation for designs with millions of gates.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2016.2598560},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2016/TCAD_SchneKHWW2016.pdf}
}
11. Timing-Accurate Estimation of IR-Drop Impact on Logic- and Clock-Paths During At-Speed Scan Test
Holst, Stefan; Schneider, Eric; Wen, Xiaoqing; Kajihara, Seiji; Yamato, Yuta; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Kochte, Michael A.
Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'16), Hiroshima, Japan, 21-24 November 2016, pp. 19-24
2016
DOI PDF 
Abstract: IR-drop induced false capture failures and test clock stretch are severe problems in at-speed scan testing. We propose a new method to efficiently and accurately identify these problems. For the first time, our approach considers the additional dynamic power caused by glitches, the spatial and temporal distribution of all toggles, and their impact on both logic paths and the clock tree without time-consuming electrical simulations.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{HolstSWKYWK2016,
  author = {Holst, Stefan and Schneider, Eric and Wen, Xiaoqing and Kajihara, Seiji and Yamato, Yuta and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Kochte, Michael A.},
  title = {{Timing-Accurate Estimation of IR-Drop Impact on Logic- and Clock-Paths During At-Speed Scan Test}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'16)},
  year = {2016},
  pages = {19--24},
  abstract = {IR-drop induced false capture failures and test clock stretch are severe problems in at-speed scan testing. We propose a new method to efficiently and accurately identify these problems. For the first time, our approach considers the additional dynamic power caused by glitches, the spatial and temporal distribution of all toggles, and their impact on both logic paths and the clock tree without time-consuming electrical simulations.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2016.49},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2016/ATS_HolstSWKYWK2016.pdf}
}
10. High-Throughput Transistor-Level Fault Simulation on GPUs
Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'16), Hiroshima, Japan, 21-24 November 2016, pp. 150-155
2016
DOI PDF 
Keywords: fault simulation; transistor level; switch level; GPUs
Abstract: Deviations in the first-order parameters of CMOS cells can lead to severe errors in the functional and time domain. With increasing sensitivity of these parameters to manufacturing defects and variation, parametric and parasitic-aware fault simulation is becoming crucial in order to support test pattern generation. Traditional approaches based on gate-level models are not sufficient to represent and capture the impact of deviations in these parameters in either an efficient or accurate manner. Evaluation at electrical level, on the other hand, severely lacks execution speed and quickly becomes inapplicable to larger designs due to high computational demands. This work presents a novel fault simulation approach considering first-order parameters in CMOS circuits to explicitly capture CMOS-specific behavior in the functional and time domain with transistor granularity. The approach utilizes massive parallelization in order to achieve high-throughput acceleration on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by exploiting parallelism of cells, stimuli and faults. Despite the more precise level of abstraction, the simulator is able to process designs with millions of gates and even outperforms conventional simulation at logic level in terms of modeling accuracy and simulation speed.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneW2016,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{High-Throughput Transistor-Level Fault Simulation on GPUs}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'16)},
  year = {2016},
  pages = {150--155},
  keywords = {fault simulation; transistor level; switch level; GPUs},
  abstract = {Deviations in the first-order parameters of CMOS cells can lead to severe errors in the functional and time domain. With increasing sensitivity of these parameters to manufacturing defects and variation, parametric and parasitic-aware fault simulation is becoming crucial in order to support test pattern generation. Traditional approaches based on gate-level models are not sufficient to represent and capture the impact of deviations in these parameters in either an efficient or accurate manner. Evaluation at electrical level, on the other hand, severely lacks execution speed and quickly becomes inapplicable to larger designs due to high computational demands. This work presents a novel fault simulation approach considering first-order parameters in CMOS circuits to explicitly capture CMOS-specific behavior in the functional and time domain with transistor granularity. The approach utilizes massive parallelization in order to achieve high-throughput acceleration on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by exploiting parallelism of cells, stimuli and faults. Despite the more precise level of abstraction, the simulator is able to process designs with millions of gates and even outperforms conventional simulation at logic level in terms of modeling accuracy and simulation speed.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2016.9},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2016/ATS_SchneW2016.pdf}
}
9. Logic/Clock-Path-Aware At-Speed Scan Test Generation for Avoiding False Capture Failures and Reducing Clock Stretch
Asada, Koji; Wen, Xiaoqing; Holst, Stefan; Miyase, Kohei; Kajihara, Seiji; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Qian, Jun
Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'15), Mumbai, India, 22-25 November 2015, pp. 103-108
ATS 2015 Best Paper Award
2015
DOI PDF 
Keywords: launch switching activity, IR-drop, logic path, clock path, false capture failure, test clock stretch, X-filling
Abstract: IR-drop induced by launch switching activity (LSA) in capture mode during at-speed scan testing increases delay along not only logic paths (LPs) but also clock paths (CPs). Excessive extra delay along LPs compromises test yields due to false capture failures, while excessive extra delay along CPs compromises test quality due to test clock stretch. This paper is the first to mitigate the impact of LSA on both LPs and CPs with a novel LCPA (Logic/Clock-Path-Aware) at-speed scan test generation scheme, featuring (1) a new metric for assessing the risk of false capture failures based on the amount of LSA around both LPs and CPs, (2) a procedure for avoiding false capture failures by reducing LSA around LPs or masking uncertain test responses, and (3) a procedure for reducing test clock stretch by reducing LSA around CPs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the LCPA scheme in improving test yields and test quality.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{AsadaWHMKKSWQ2015,
  author = {Asada, Koji and Wen, Xiaoqing and Holst, Stefan and Miyase, Kohei and Kajihara, Seiji and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Qian, Jun},
  title = {{Logic/Clock-Path-Aware At-Speed Scan Test Generation for Avoiding False Capture Failures and Reducing Clock Stretch}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'15)},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {103-108},
  keywords = { launch switching activity, IR-drop, logic path, clock path, false capture failure, test clock stretch, X-filling },
  abstract = {IR-drop induced by launch switching activity (LSA) in capture mode during at-speed scan testing increases delay along not only logic paths (LPs) but also clock paths (CPs). Excessive extra delay along LPs compromises test yields due to false capture failures, while excessive extra delay along CPs compromises test quality due to test clock stretch. This paper is the first to mitigate the impact of LSA on both LPs and CPs with a novel LCPA (Logic/Clock-Path-Aware) at-speed scan test generation scheme, featuring (1) a new metric for assessing the risk of false capture failures based on the amount of LSA around both LPs and CPs, (2) a procedure for avoiding false capture failures by reducing LSA around LPs or masking uncertain test responses, and (3) a procedure for reducing test clock stretch by reducing LSA around CPs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the LCPA scheme in improving test yields and test quality.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2015.25},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2015/ATS_AsadaWHMKKSWQ2015.pdf}
}
8. Optimized Selection of Frequencies for Faster-Than-at-Speed Test
Kampmann, Matthias; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Indlekofer, Thomas; Hellebrand, Sybille; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'15), Mumbai, India, 22-25 November 2015, pp. 109-114
2015
DOI PDF 
Keywords: BIST, small delay defects, delay test, faster-than-at-speed-test
Abstract: Small gate delay faults (SDFs) are not detectable at-speed, if they can only be propagated along short paths. These hidden delay faults (HDFs) do not influence the circuit’s behavior initially, but they may indicate design marginalities leading to early-life failures, and therefore they cannot be neglected. HDFs can be detected by faster-than-at-speed test (FAST), where typically several different frequencies are used to maximize the coverage. A given set of test patterns P potentially detects a HDF if it contains a test pattern sensitizing a path through the fault site, and the efficiency of FAST can be measured as the ratio of actually detected HDFs to potentially detected HDFs. The paper at hand targets maximum test efficiency with a minimum number of frequencies. The procedure starts with a test set for transition delay faults and a set of preselected equidistant frequencies. Timing-accurate simulation of this initial setup identifies the hard-to-detect faults, which are then targeted by a more complex timing-aware ATPG procedure. For the yet undetected HDFs, a minimum number of frequencies are determined using an efficient hypergraph algorithm. Experimental results show that with this approach, the number of test frequencies required for maximum test efficiency can be reduced considerably. Furthermore, test set inflation is limited as timing-aware ATPG is only used for a small subset of HDFs.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{KampmKSIHW2015,
  author = {Kampmann, Matthias and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Indlekofer, Thomas and Hellebrand, Sybille and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Optimized Selection of Frequencies for Faster-Than-at-Speed Test}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'15)},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {109-114},
  keywords = {BIST, small delay defects, delay test, faster-than-at-speed-test},
  abstract = {Small gate delay faults (SDFs) are not detectable at-speed, if they can only be propagated along short paths. These hidden delay faults (HDFs) do not influence the circuit’s behavior initially, but they may indicate design marginalities leading to early-life failures, and therefore they cannot be neglected. HDFs can be detected by faster-than-at-speed test (FAST), where typically several different frequencies are used to maximize the coverage. A given set of test patterns P potentially detects a HDF if it contains a test pattern sensitizing a path through the fault site, and the efficiency of FAST can be measured as the ratio of actually detected HDFs to potentially detected HDFs. The paper at hand targets maximum test efficiency with a minimum number of frequencies. The procedure starts with a test set for transition delay faults and a set of preselected equidistant frequencies. Timing-accurate simulation of this initial setup identifies the hard-to-detect faults, which are then targeted by a more complex timing-aware ATPG procedure. For the yet undetected HDFs, a minimum number of frequencies are determined using an efficient hypergraph algorithm. Experimental results show that with this approach, the number of test frequencies required for maximum test efficiency can be reduced considerably. Furthermore, test set inflation is limited as timing-aware ATPG is only used for a small subset of HDFs.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2015.26},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2015/ATS_KampmKSIHW2015.pdf}
}
7. STRAP: Stress-Aware Placement for Aging Mitigation in Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures
Zhang, Hongyan; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Bauer, Lars; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Henkel, Jörg
Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD'15), Austin, Texas, USA, 2-6 November 2015, pp. 38-45
2015
URL PDF 
Abstract: Aging effects in nano-scale CMOS circuits impair the reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of embedded systems. Especially for FPGAs that are manufactured in the latest technology node, aging is a major concern. We introduce the first cross-layer aging-aware placement method for accelerators in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable architectures. It optimizes stress distribution by accelerator placement at runtime, i.e. to which reconfigurable region an accelerator shall be reconfigured. Additionally, it optimizes logic placement at synthesis time to diversify the resource usage of individual accelerators, i.e. which CLBs of a reconfigurable region shall be used by an accelerator. Both layers together balance the intra- and inter-region stress induced by the application workload at negligible performance cost. Experimental results show significant reduction of maximum stress of up to 64% and 35%, which leads to up to 177% and 14% MTTF improvement relative to state-of- the-art methods w.r.t. HCI and BTI aging, respectively.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{ZhangKSBWH2015,
  author = {Zhang, Hongyan and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Bauer, Lars and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Henkel, Jörg},
  title = {{STRAP: Stress-Aware Placement for Aging Mitigation in Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD'15)},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {38-45},
  abstract = {Aging effects in nano-scale CMOS circuits impair the reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of embedded systems. Especially for FPGAs that are manufactured in the latest technology node, aging is a major concern. We introduce the first cross-layer aging-aware placement method for accelerators in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable architectures. It optimizes stress distribution by accelerator placement at runtime, i.e. to which reconfigurable region an accelerator shall be reconfigured. Additionally, it optimizes logic placement at synthesis time to diversify the resource usage of individual accelerators, i.e. which CLBs of a reconfigurable region shall be used by an accelerator. Both layers together balance the intra- and inter-region stress induced by the application workload at negligible performance cost. Experimental results show significant reduction of maximum stress of up to 64% and 35%, which leads to up to 177% and 14% MTTF improvement relative to state-of- the-art methods w.r.t. HCI and BTI aging, respectively.},
  url = { http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2840825 },
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2015/ICCAD_ZhangKSBWH2015.pdf}
}
6. GPU-Accelerated Small Delay Fault Simulation
Schneider, Eric; Holst, Stefan; Kochte, Michael A.; Wen, Xiaoqing; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'15), Grenoble, France, 9-13 March 2015, pp. 1174-1179
Best Paper Candidate
2015
DOI URL PDF 
Abstract: The simulation of delay faults is an essential task in design validation and reliability assessment of circuits. Due to the high sensitivity of current nano-scale designs against smallest delay deviations, small delay faults recently became the focus of test research. Because of the subtle delay impact, traditional fault simulation approaches based on abstract timing models are not sufficient for representing small delay faults. Hence, timing accurate simulation approaches have to be utilized, which quickly become inapplicable for larger designs due to high computational requirements. In this work we present a waveform-accurate approach for fast high-throughput small delay fault simulation on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). By exploiting parallelism from gates, faults and patterns, the proposed approach enables accurate exhaustive small delay fault simulation even for multi-million gate designs without fault dropping for the first time.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneHKWW2015,
  author = { Schneider, Eric and Holst, Stefan and Kochte, Michael A. and Wen, Xiaoqing and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim },
  title = {{GPU-Accelerated Small Delay Fault Simulation}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'15)},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {1174--1179},
  abstract = {The simulation of delay faults is an essential task in design validation and reliability assessment of circuits. Due to the high sensitivity of current nano-scale designs against smallest delay deviations, small delay faults recently became the focus of test research. Because of the subtle delay impact, traditional fault simulation approaches based on abstract timing models are not sufficient for representing small delay faults. Hence, timing accurate simulation approaches have to be utilized, which quickly become inapplicable for larger designs due to high computational requirements. In this work we present a waveform-accurate approach for fast high-throughput small delay fault simulation on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). By exploiting parallelism from gates, faults and patterns, the proposed approach enables accurate exhaustive small delay fault simulation even for multi-million gate designs without fault dropping for the first time.},
  url = { http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2757084 },
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2015.0077},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2015/DATE_SchneHKWW2015.pdf}
}
5. Data-Parallel Simulation for Fast and Accurate Timing Validation of CMOS Circuits
Schneider, Eric; Holst, Stefan; Wen, Xiaoqing; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD'14), San Jose, California, USA, 3-6 November 2014, pp. 17-23
2014
URL PDF 
Abstract: Gate-level timing simulation of combinational CMOS circuits is the foundation of a whole array of important EDA tools such as timing analysis and power-estimation, but the demand for higher simulation accuracy drastically increases the runtime complexity of the algorithms. Data-parallel accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) provide vast amounts of computing performance to tackle this problem, but require careful attention to control-flow and memory access patterns. This paper proposes the novel High-Throughput Oriented Parallel Switch-level Simulator (HiTOPS), which is especially designed to take full advantage of GPUs and provides accurate time- simulation for multi-million gate designs at an unprecedented throughput. HiTOPS models timing at transistor granularity and supports all major timing-related effects found in CMOS including pattern-dependent delay, glitch filtering and transition ramps, while achieving speedups of up to two orders of magnitude compared to traditional gate-level simulators.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneHWW2014,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Holst, Stefan and Wen, Xiaoqing and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Data-Parallel Simulation for Fast and Accurate Timing Validation of CMOS Circuits}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD'14)},
  year = {2014},
  pages = {17--23},
  abstract = {Gate-level timing simulation of combinational CMOS circuits is the foundation of a whole array of important EDA tools such as timing analysis and power-estimation, but the demand for higher simulation accuracy drastically increases the runtime complexity of the algorithms. Data-parallel accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) provide vast amounts of computing performance to tackle this problem, but require careful attention to control-flow and memory access patterns. This paper proposes the novel High-Throughput Oriented Parallel Switch-level Simulator (HiTOPS), which is especially designed to take full advantage of GPUs and provides accurate time- simulation for multi-million gate designs at an unprecedented throughput. HiTOPS models timing at transistor granularity and supports all major timing-related effects found in CMOS including pattern-dependent delay, glitch filtering and transition ramps, while achieving speedups of up to two orders of magnitude compared to traditional gate-level simulators.},
  url = { http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2691369 },
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2014/ICCAD_SchneHWW2014.pdf}
}
4. Variation-Aware Deterministic ATPG
Sauer, Matthias; Polian, Ilia; Imhof, Michael E.; Mumtaz, Abdullah; Schneider, Eric; Czutro, Alexander; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Becker, Bernd
Proceedings of the 19th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS'14), Paderborn, Germany, 26-30 May 2014, pp. 87-92
Best paper award
2014
DOI URL PDF 
Keywords: Variation-aware test, fault efficiency, ATPG
Abstract: In technologies affected by variability, the detection status of a small-delay fault may vary among manufactured circuit instances. The same fault may be detected, missed or provably undetectable in different circuit instances. We introduce the first complete flow to accurately evaluate and systematically maximize the test quality under variability. As the number of possible circuit instances is infinite, we employ statistical analysis to obtain a test set that achieves a fault-efficiency target with an user-defined confidence level. The algorithm combines a classical path-oriented test-generation procedure with a novel waveformaccurate engine that can formally prove that a small-delay fault is not detectable and does not count towards fault efficiency. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the performance of the generated test sets for industrial circuits affected by uncorrelated and correlated variations.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SauerPIMSCWB2014,
  author = {Sauer, Matthias and Polian, Ilia and Imhof, Michael E. and Mumtaz, Abdullah and Schneider, Eric and Czutro, Alexander and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Becker, Bernd},
  title = {{Variation-Aware Deterministic ATPG}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS'14)},
  year = {2014},
  pages = {87--92},
  keywords = {Variation-aware test, fault efficiency, ATPG},
  abstract = {In technologies affected by variability, the detection status of a small-delay fault may vary among manufactured circuit instances. The same fault may be detected, missed or provably undetectable in different circuit instances. We introduce the first complete flow to accurately evaluate and systematically maximize the test quality under variability. As the number of possible circuit instances is infinite, we employ statistical analysis to obtain a test set that achieves a fault-efficiency target with an user-defined confidence level. The algorithm combines a classical path-oriented test-generation procedure with a novel waveformaccurate engine that can formally prove that a small-delay fault is not detectable and does not count towards fault efficiency. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the performance of the generated test sets for industrial circuits affected by uncorrelated and correlated variations.},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6847806},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ETS.2014.6847806},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2014/ETS_SauerPIMSCWB2014.pdf}
}
3. Module Diversification: Fault Tolerance and Aging Mitigation for Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures
Zhang, Hongyan; Bauer, Lars; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Braun, Claus; Imhof, Michael E.; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim; Henkel, Jörg
Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'13), Anaheim, California, USA, 10-12 September 2013
2013
DOI URL PDF 
Keywords: Reliability, online test, fault-tolerance, aging mitigation, partial runtime reconfiguration, FPGA
Abstract: Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are attractive for realizing complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability of such systems and must be tackled by aging mitigation and application of fault tolerance techniques. This paper presents module diversification, a novel design method that creates different configurations for runtime reconfigurable modules. Our method provides fault tolerance by creating the minimal number of configurations such that for any faulty Configurable Logic Block (CLB) there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB. Additionally, we determine the fraction of time that each configuration should be used to balance the stress and to mitigate the aging process in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable systems. The generated configurations significantly improve reliability by fault-tolerance and aging mitigation.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{ZhangBKSBIWH2013,
  author = {Zhang, Hongyan and Bauer, Lars and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Braun, Claus and Imhof, Michael E. and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim and Henkel, Jörg},
  title = {{Module Diversification: Fault Tolerance and Aging Mitigation for Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC'13)},
  year = {2013},
  keywords = {Reliability, online test, fault-tolerance, aging mitigation, partial runtime reconfiguration, FPGA},
  abstract = {Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are attractive for realizing complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability of such systems and must be tackled by aging mitigation and application of fault tolerance techniques. This paper presents module diversification, a novel design method that creates different configurations for runtime reconfigurable modules. Our method provides fault tolerance by creating the minimal number of configurations such that for any faulty Configurable Logic Block (CLB) there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB. Additionally, we determine the fraction of time that each configuration should be used to balance the stress and to mitigate the aging process in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable systems. The generated configurations significantly improve reliability by fault-tolerance and aging mitigation.},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6651926},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TEST.2013.6651926},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2013/ITC_ZhangBKSBIWH2013.pdf}
}
2. Test Strategies for Reliable Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures
Bauer, Lars; Braun, Claus; Imhof, Michael E.; Kochte, Michael A.; Schneider, Eric; Zhang, Hongyan; Henkel, Jörg; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Vol. 62(8), Los Alamitos, California, USA, August 2013, pp. 1494-1507
2013
DOI URL PDF 
Keywords: FPGA, Reconfigurable Architectures, Online Test
Abstract: FPGA-based reconfigurable systems allow the online adaptation to dynamically changing runtime requirements. The reliability of FPGAs, being manufactured in latest technologies, is threatened by soft errors, as well as aging effects and latent defects.To ensure reliable reconfiguration, it is mandatory to guarantee the correct operation of the reconfigurable fabric. This can be achieved by periodic or on-demand online testing. This paper presents a reliable system architecture for runtime-reconfigurable systems, which integrates two non-concurrent online test strategies: Pre-configuration online tests (PRET) and post-configuration online tests (PORT). The PRET checks that the reconfigurable hardware is free of faults by periodic or on-demand tests. The PORT has two objectives: It tests reconfigured hardware units after reconfiguration to check that the configuration process completed correctly and it validates the expected functionality. During operation, PORT is used to periodically check the reconfigured hardware units for malfunctions in the programmable logic. Altogether, this paper presents PRET, PORT, and the system integration of such test schemes into a runtime-reconfigurable system, including the resource management and test scheduling. Experimental results show that the integration of online testing in reconfigurable systems incurs only minimum impact on performance while delivering high fault coverage and low test latency.
BibTeX:
@article{BauerBIKSZHW2013,
  author = {Bauer, Lars and Braun, Claus and Imhof, Michael E. and Kochte, Michael A. and Schneider, Eric and Zhang, Hongyan and Henkel, Jörg and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Test Strategies for Reliable Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures}},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computers},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  year = {2013},
  volume = {62},
  number = {8},
  pages = {1494--1507},
  keywords = {FPGA, Reconfigurable Architectures, Online Test},
  abstract = {FPGA-based reconfigurable systems allow the online adaptation to dynamically changing runtime requirements. The reliability of FPGAs, being manufactured in latest technologies, is threatened by soft errors, as well as aging effects and latent defects.To ensure reliable reconfiguration, it is mandatory to guarantee the correct operation of the reconfigurable fabric. This can be achieved by periodic or on-demand online testing. This paper presents a reliable system architecture for runtime-reconfigurable systems, which integrates two non-concurrent online test strategies: Pre-configuration online tests (PRET) and post-configuration online tests (PORT). The PRET checks that the reconfigurable hardware is free of faults by periodic or on-demand tests. The PORT has two objectives: It tests reconfigured hardware units after reconfiguration to check that the configuration process completed correctly and it validates the expected functionality. During operation, PORT is used to periodically check the reconfigured hardware units for malfunctions in the programmable logic. Altogether, this paper presents PRET, PORT, and the system integration of such test schemes into a runtime-reconfigurable system, including the resource management and test scheduling. Experimental results show that the integration of online testing in reconfigurable systems incurs only minimum impact on performance while delivering high fault coverage and low test latency.},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6475939},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TC.2013.53},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2013/TC_BauerBIKSZHW2013.pdf}
}
1. Scan Test Power Simulation on GPGPUs
Holst, Stefan; Schneider, Eric; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'12), Niigata, Japan, 19-22 November 2012, pp. 155-160
2012
DOI PDF 
Keywords: GPGPU, Data–Parallelism, Scan–Test, Power, Time–Simulation, Hazards, Pulse–Filtering
Abstract: The precise estimation of dynamic power consumption, power droop and temperature development during scan test require a very large number of time–aware gate–level logic simulations. Until now, such characterizations have been feasible only for rather small designs or with reduced precision due to the high computational demands. We propose a new, throughput–optimized timing simulator on running on GPGPUs to accelerate these tasks by more than two orders of magnitude and thus providing for the first time precise and comprehensive toggle data for industrial–sized designs and over long scan test operations. Hazards and pulse–filtering are supported for the first time in a GPGPU accelerated simulator, and the system can easily be extended to even more sophisticated delay and power models.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{HolstSW2012,
  author = {Holst, Stefan and Schneider, Eric and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Scan Test Power Simulation on GPGPUs}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'12)},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  year = {2012},
  pages = {155--160},
  keywords = {GPGPU, Data–Parallelism, Scan–Test, Power, Time–Simulation, Hazards, Pulse–Filtering},
  abstract = {The precise estimation of dynamic power consumption, power droop and temperature development during scan test require a very large number of time–aware gate–level logic simulations. Until now, such characterizations have been feasible only for rather small designs or with reduced precision due to the high computational demands. We propose a new, throughput–optimized timing simulator on running on GPGPUs to accelerate these tasks by more than two orders of magnitude and thus providing for the first time precise and comprehensive toggle data for industrial–sized designs and over long scan test operations. Hazards and pulse–filtering are supported for the first time in a GPGPU accelerated simulator, and the system can easily be extended to even more sophisticated delay and power models.},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2012.23},
  file = {http://www.iti.uni-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/rami/files/publications/2012/ATS_HolstSW2012.pdf}
}
Created by JabRef on 25/04/2023.
Workshop Contributions
Matching entries: 0
settings...
1. Hochbeschleunigte Simulation von Verzögerungsfehlern unter Prozessvariationen
Schneider, Eric; Kochte, Michael A.; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim
27th GI/GMM/ITG Workshop "Testmethoden und Zuverlässigkeit von Schaltungen und Systemen" (TuZ'15), Bad Urach, Germany, 1-3 March 2015
2015
 
Abstract: Die Simulation kleiner Verzögerungsfehler ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Validierung nano-elektronischer Schaltungen. Prozessvariationen während der Herstellung haben großen Einfluss auf die Erkennung dieser Fehler und müssen bei der Simulation berücksichtigt werden. Die zeitgenaue Simulation von Verzögerungsfehlern ist verglichen mit traditioneller Logiksimulation oder statischer Zeitanalyse sehr aufwändig und die Rechenkomplexität steigt durch die Berücksichtigung von Variationen zusätzlich an. In dieser Arbeit wird ein hochparalleles Verfahren vorgestellt, welches Grafikprozessoren zur beschleunigten parallelen Simulation kleiner Verzögerungsfehler unter Variation anwendet. Das Verfahren berechnet akkurate Signalverläufe in der Schaltung und ermöglicht die Bestimmung einer Monte-Carlo-basierten statistischen Fehlererfassung für industrielle Schaltkreise unter zufälliger sowie systematischer Variation.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{SchneKW2015,
  author = {Schneider, Eric and Kochte, Michael A. and Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim},
  title = {{Hochbeschleunigte Simulation von Verzögerungsfehlern unter Prozessvariationen}},
  booktitle = {27th GI/GMM/ITG Workshop "Testmethoden und Zuverlässigkeit von Schaltungen und Systemen" (TuZ'15)},
  year = {2015},
  abstract = {Die Simulation kleiner Verzögerungsfehler ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Validierung nano-elektronischer Schaltungen. Prozessvariationen während der Herstellung haben großen Einfluss auf die Erkennung dieser Fehler und müssen bei der Simulation berücksichtigt werden. Die zeitgenaue Simulation von Verzögerungsfehlern ist verglichen mit traditioneller Logiksimulation oder statischer Zeitanalyse sehr aufwändig und die Rechenkomplexität steigt durch die Berücksichtigung von Variationen zusätzlich an. In dieser Arbeit wird ein hochparalleles Verfahren vorgestellt, welches Grafikprozessoren zur beschleunigten parallelen Simulation kleiner Verzögerungsfehler unter Variation anwendet. Das Verfahren berechnet akkurate Signalverläufe in der Schaltung und ermöglicht die Bestimmung einer Monte-Carlo-basierten statistischen Fehlererfassung für industrielle Schaltkreise unter zufälliger sowie systematischer Variation.}
}
Created by JabRef on 25/04/2023.
Miscellaneous Activities

12.

Small Delay Fault Diagnosis with Compacted Responses
Holst, S., Schneider, E., Kochte, M.A., Wen, X., Wunderlich, H.-J.
Poster at 56th Design Automation Conf. (DAC), Las Vegas, USA, Jun. 04, 2019.

11.

Poster How-To
Schneider, E., Holst S.

Special lecture at 2016 International Symposium on Dependable Integrated Systems in collaboration with the Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, JP, Nov. 28, 2016.

10.

Diagnosis of Small Delay Faults
Schneider, E.

2016 Joint Workshop on Dependable Integrated Systems in collaboration with the Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, JP, Sep. 9, 2016.

9.

High-Throughput Parallel Simulation - The Key to Efficient Design and Test Validation
Schneider, E.
Special lecture at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, JP, Sep. 8, 2016.

8.

How to master a Master in Germany?
Schneider, E.
Special lecture at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, JP, Sep. 8, 2016.

7.

Hazard-Activated Stuck-Open Fault Simulation
Schneider, E.

2016 Joint DAAD/JSPS Spring Research Workshop (Stuttgart-Iizuka), University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, DE, Mar. 2-5, 2016.

6.

GPU-Accelerated Small Delay Fault Simulation
Schneider, E.
Invited talk at 2015 Joint Workshop on Dependable Integrated Systems in collaboration with the Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, JP, Sep. 3, 2015.

5.

GPU-Accelerated Small Delay Fault Simulation
Schneider, E.
Invited talk at Osaka University, Osaka, JP, Aug. 31, 2015.

4.

44. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik, Informatik 2014, Big Data - Komplexität meistern, 22.-26. September 2014 in Stuttgart
Plödereder, E., Grunske, L., Schneider, E., Ull, D. (Hrsg.)
GI-Edition - Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Vol. P-232, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), Sep. 22-26, 2014,
ISBN: 978-3-88579-626-8, Bonner Köllen Verlag, Bonn, DE, 2014.

3.

Massive Throughput Computing: GPUs and their Application in EDA
Schneider, E.
Special lecture at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, JP, Sep. 19, 2014.

2.

Data-Parallel Switch-Level Simulation for Fast and Accurate Timing Validation of CMOS Circuits
Schneider, E., Holst, S., Wen, X., Wunderlich, H.-J.
Poster at 51st Design Automation Conf. (DAC), San Francisco, CA, USA, Jun. 1-5, 2014.

1.

GPU-Accelerated Small Delay Fault Simulation
Schneider, E., Holst, S., Wunderlich, H.-J.
Poster at Dependable GPU Computing Workshop, ACM/IEEE Conf. on Design and Test in Europe (DATE),
Dresden, DE, Mar. 24-28, 2014.

 

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