Events Calendar

Reliable Circuits and Systems

Abstract: As devices become smaller, circuits and systems are more vulnerable to soft errors caused by radiation and other environmental upsets. Fault tolerance measured by mean time to failure (MTTF) is desired, especially if no extra area, power and delay and little change of the existing design flow are introduced.
Using FPGA and internet router as a testbed, this talk first presents fault tolerance techniques applying (1) logic don't care and path re-convergence (ROSE) and (2) in-place logic re-writing (IPR). Both increase MTTF by 2X with little or no overhead. Particularly, IPR does not change circuit placement and routing, and can be readily used with the existing industrial design flow. It also leads to a self evolution method to enhance fault tolerance
for FPGA based circuits and systems. Finally, I will briefly introduce other ongoing research at my group related to reliability, including circuit tuning for device aging, robust analog circuit, and system-level reliability for cyber-physical systems such as hybrid/plug-in cars and renewal energy storage.Bio: Dr. Lei He is an associate professor at UCLA’s electrical engineering department, and was a faculty member at University of Wisconsin, Madison between 1999 and 2001. He also held visiting or consulting positions with Intel, Hewlett-Package, Cadence and Synopsys, was a technical advisory board member for Rio Design Automation, and Apache Design Solutions, and is a guest professor at Fudan University at Shanghai and China National Laboratory for Optoelectronics. His research interests include electronic design automation, VLSI circuits and systems, and cyber-physical systems. He has published one book and over 200 technical papers and has been a technical program committee member for a number of conferences including Design Automation Conference, International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Array, and International Symposium on Physical Design. Dr. He was granted the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000, UCLA Chancellor's faculty career development award in 2003, IBM Faculty Award in 2003, and Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching award in 2005. Host: Prof. Massoud Pedram, pedram@ceng.usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 349

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Annie Yu