Reliable System Design: A Communication-Theoretic Paradigm

This talk will describe our vision for reliable system-on-a-chip (SOC) design. Our vision is based on the idea of viewing deep submicron VLSI circuits and systems as noisy communication channels. This idea, proposed in 1997, was embraced by the semiconductor industry as is evident in the 2001 ITRS. The inclusion of the reliability thrust in the Gigascale Silicon Research Center and C2S2 in 2003 is also consistent with this vision. This talk will describe key results including the use of information theory to determine fundamental bounds on energy-efficiency of noisy VLSI circuits, and the use of noise tolerance at the circuit and algorithmic levels as a practical and effective means to design energy-efficient and reliable systems.

Bio
Naresh Shanbhag received his Ph.D. degree in EE from University of Minnesota in 1993. From July 1993 to August 1995, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill in the Wide Area Networks Group, where he was responsible of development of VLSI algorithms, architectures and implementation for high-speed data communications applications. In particular, he was the lead chip architect for AT&T's 51.84 Mb/s transceiver chips over twisted-pair wiring for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-LAN and VDSL. Since August 1995, he is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory where he is presently an Associate Professor and Director of the Illinois Center for Integrated Microsystems. At University of Illinois, he founded the VLSI Information Processing Systems (ViPS) Group, whose charter is to explore issues related to low-power, high-performance, and reliable integrated circuit implementations of broadband communications and digital signal processing systems. He has published numerous journal articles book chapters/conference publications in this area and holds three US patents. He is also a co-author of the research monograph Pipelined Adaptive Digital Filters (Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1994). Dr. Shanbhag received the 2001 IEEE Transactions Best Paper Award, 1999 Xerox Faculty Research Award, 1999 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Best Paper Award, the 1997 Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Circuit and Systems Society (97-99), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996, and the 1994 Darlington Best Paper Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems society. From 1997-99 and 2000-2002, he served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems: Part II and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on VLSI, respectively. He was the technical program chair for the 2002 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS02). Dr. Shanbhag is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Intersymbol Communications, Inc., a start-up in Champaign-Urbana that designs advanced signal processing-enhanced receiver ICs for optical communication links.