14957395
A statistical performance simulation methodology for VLSI circuits
A statistical performance simulation (SPS) methodology for VLSI circuits is presented. Traditional methods of worst-case corner analysis lack accuracy and Monte-Carlo simulations cannot be applied to VLSI circuits because of their complexity. SPS methodology is accurate because no statistical information about the device parameter variation is lost. It achieves efficiency by analyzing the smaller circuit blocks and generating the performance distribution for the entire circuit. Circuit evaluation at any specified performance level is possible.
9059175
On thermal effects in deep sub-micron VLSI interconnects
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the thermal effects in advanced high performance interconnect systems arising due to self-heating under various circuit conditions, including electrostatic discharge. Technology (Cu, low-k etc.) and scaling effects on the thermal characteristics of the interconnects, and on their electromigration reliability has been analyzed simultaneously, which will have important implications for providing robust and aggressive deep sub-micron interconnect design guidelines. Furthermore, the impact of these thermal effects on the design (driver sizing) and optimization of the interconnect length between repeaters at the upper-level signal lines are investigated.
206440147
Berkeley reliability tools-BERT
Berkeley reliability tools (BERT) simulates the circuit degradation (drift) due to hot-electron degradation in MOSFETs and bipolar transistors and predicts circuit failure rates due to oxide breakdown and electromigration in CMOS, bipolar, and BiCMOS circuits. With the increasing importance of reliability in today's and future technology, a reliability simulator such as this is expected to serve as the engine of design-for-reliability in a building-in-reliability paradigm. BERT works in conjunction with a circuit simulator such as SPICE in order to simulate reliability for actual circuits, and, like SPICE, acts as an interactive tool for design. BERT is introduced and the current work being done is summarized. BERT is used to study the reliability of a BiCMOS inverter chain, and performance data are presented. >
6208845
Efficient generation of delay change curves for noise-aware static timing analysis
In this paper, we explore the concept of using analytical models to efficiently generate delay change curves (DCCs) that can then be used to characterize the impact of noise on any victim/aggressor configuration. Such an approach captures important noise considerations such as the possibility of delay change even when the switching windows of neighboring gates do not overlap. The technique is model-independent, which we demonstrate by using several crosstalk noise models to obtain results. Furthermore, we extend an existing noise model to more accurately handle multiple aggressors in the timing analysis framework. DCC results from the analytical approach closely match those from time-consuming SPICE simulations, making timing analysis using DCCs efficient as well as accurate.
14245590
RED with optimized dynamic threshold deployment on shared buffer
Prior survey of RED algorithm deployment on multiqueue system with shared buffer was unfair and sensitive to congestion level by statically setting the parameters. In this paper, our goal is to deploy the Random Early Detection (RED) algorithm in routers on shared buffer and solve these problems. A novel buffer management scheme that dynamically adjusts the parameters of RED named RED-ODT is proposed. Simulations under uniform traffic load and nonuniform traffic load are given, the results of which ascertain and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of low packet drop ratio, satisfying buffer utilization and fairness. Simulation also shows that RED-ODT is insensitive to congestion level.
2350863
Generating and Applying Rules for Interval Valued Fuzzy Observations
One of the objectives of intelligent data engineering and automated learning is to develop algorithms that learn the environment, generate rules, and take possible courses of actions. In this paper, we report our work on how to generate and apply such rules with a rule matrix model. Since the environments can be interval valued and rules often fuzzy, we further study how to obtain and apply rules for interval valued fuzzy observations.
8145594
Effects of global interconnect optimizations on performance estimation of deep submicron design
In this paper, we quantify the impact of global interconnect optimization techniques that address such design objectives as delay, peak noise, delay uncertainty due to noise, power, and cost. In doing so, we develop a new system-performance simulation model as a set of studies within the MARCO GSRC Technology Extrapolation (GTX) system. We model a typical point-to-point global interconnect and focus on accurate assessment of both circuit and design technology with respect to such issues as inductance, signal line shielding, dynamic delay, buffer placement uncertainty and repeater staggering. We demonstrate, for example, that optimal wire sizing models need to consider inductive effects-and that use of more accurate (-1,3) worst-case capacitive coupling noise switch factors substantially increases peak noise estimates compared to traditional (0,2) bounds. We also find that optimal repeater sizes are significantly smaller than conventional models would suggest, especially when considering energy-delay issues.
1743563
Toward an evaluation infrastructure for power and energy optimizations
Execution-driven simulators are often used for power/energy and performance evaluation. Simulators can provide semantic details but they provide insufficient speed and accuracy for compiler and OS research. Physical measurement is fast and objective but lacks a semantic connection between the measurement result and the evaluated program. The objective of our research is to bring together the advantages of simulation and physical measurement to build an infrastructure for power and energy optimization. Power and energy behavior is obtained through physical measurement. Simulation is used for observing the connection between power and energy behavior and the evaluated program. Our preliminary results demonstrate the ability of this infrastructure to capture detailed power behavior of any region of a program. To simplify the power/energy evaluation of programs with long execution times and overcome the limitation of physical devices, we propose using the SimPoints methodology developed by researchers at UC San Diego to find representative slices of a program. Through simulation, we validate the feasibility of the SimPoint idea in simplifying power/energy evaluation. We expect that this infrastructure will help researchers in OS/compiler power/energy optimization to evaluate their optimizations more efficiently and observe more optimization opportunities.
12971605
AAM derived face representations for robust facial action recognition
In this paper, we present results on experiments employing active appearance model (AAM) derived facial representations, for the task of facial action recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the benefit of AAM-derived representations on a spontaneous AU database containing "real-world" variation. Additionally, we explore a number of normalization methods for these representations which increase facial action recognition performance