10023746
Test and diagnosis of word-oriented multiport memories
Conventionally, the test of multiport memories is considered difficult because of the complex behavior of the faulty memories and the large number of inter-port faults. This paper presents an efficient approach for testing and diagnosing multiport RAMs. Our approach takes advantage of the higher access bandwidth due to the increased number of read/write ports, which also provides higher observability and controllability that effectively reduces the test time. Our key idea is that a sequence of March operations for any memory cell can be folded and executed within a single access cycle. We have also developed an efficient test algorithm for port-specific faults as well as traditional cell faults. The port-specific faults include the stuck-open, address decoder, and inter-port faults, for both bit-oriented and word-oriented RAMs. Experimental results for our folding scheme show that the test time reduction is about 28% for a commercial 8 KB embedded SRAM. An efficient diagnostic algorithm is also proposed for the port-specific faults and traditional cell faults.
29576760
A configurable AES processor for enhanced security
6577464
An HMAC processor with integrated SHA-1 and MD5 algorithms
Cryptographic algorithms are prevalent and important in digital communications and storage, e.g., both SHA-1 and MD5 algorithms are widely used hash functions in IPSec and SSL for checking the data integrity. In this paper, we propose a hardware architecture for the standard HMAC function that supports both. Our HMAC design automatically generates the padding words and reuses the key for consecutive HMAC jobs that use the same key. We have also implemented the HMAC design in silicon. Compared with existing designs, our HMAC processor has lower hardware cost---12.5% by sharing of the SHA-1 and MD5 circuitry and a little performance penalty.
14027625
On test and diagnostics of flash memories
Embedded flash memory has been widely used in applications that require non-volatile on-chip storage elements. However, test and diagnostics of flash memories needs further investigation so that the overall cost of the products can be reduced. This paper presents the challenges and issues for test and diagnostics of flash memories, based on our recent experiences. We also suggest improvement of the test and diagnosis flow, including design-for-testability (DFT) using built-in self-test (BIST), built-in self-repair (BISR), and failure analysis. In addition, we present a configurable flash memory tester using FPGA for low-cost testing and diagnostics. Experimental results on industrial flash chips justify the effectiveness of our test and diagnostics system.
6505998
Failure factor based yield enhancement for SRAM designs
With increasing chip density, semiconductor memory yield improvement is becoming a task that can only be done collaboratively by test engineers, product engineers, process engineers, and circuit designers. Design-for-manufacturability (DFM) and design-for-yield (DFY) methodologies have an increasing impact on the yield learning of modem silicon chips. However, a major part of a system chip is typically occupied by memories, which dominate the yield of the chip. During chip integration, it is important that we pick the right design of memory cores that will maximize the yield under the specific process technology chosen. Traditionally, yield prediction is only based on layout and defect statistics. In this paper, we propose to estimate the yield with a failure factor. We thus develop a memory failure factor analyzer (FFA), based on that, we can select the memory design that is more suitable for the given process technology. Experimental results show that we can efficiently evaluate the yields of different memory designs for the same specification, so that the most robust one, that results in the highest yield, can be selected.
904578
Simulation-based test algorithm generation for random access memories
Although there are well known test algorithms that have been used by the industry for years for testing semiconductor random-access memories (RAMs), systematic evaluation of their effectiveness and efficiency has been a difficult job. In the past, it was mainly done manually by proving a certain algorithm can detect a certain type of fault. As memory technology keeps innovating, the growing complexity of the memories and number of fault types that need to be covered will require more effective and efficient test algorithms to be discovered in much shorter time. A systematic approach for developing and evaluating memory test algorithms is thus desired. We propose such an approach here: test algorithm generation by simulation (TAGS), which generates and optimizes test algorithms, given a test time budget. Experimental results show that the algorithms generated by TAGS are more efficient than the traditional test algorithms. Using TAGS, a series of test algorithms with a detailed list of faults covered by each algorithm can be generated, providing easy trade-off between test time and fault coverage.
16039010
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Real-Time Active Content Distribution Service
The phenomenal growth of the world-wide web has made it the most popular Internet application today. Web caching and content distribution services have been recognized as valuable techniques to mitigate the explosion of web traffic. An increasing fraction of web traffic today is dynamically generated and therefore intrinsically difficult to replicate or cache using present static approaches. Scalable delivery of such active content poses a myriad of challenges, including content replication, update propagation, and consistency management. This paper makes two contributions: it (1) describes a scalable architecture for transparent demand-driven distribution of active content; and (2) presents a system that can provide real-time delay guarantees on content access. Our approach involves migrating the scripts which generate dynamic web traffic, and their data, from the origin servers to active content distribution proxies nearest to the clients. We also present mechanisms on these proxies to enforce real-time delay guarantees for client requests. Our system is implemented and deployed on Planetlab (2004), a real-world distributed Internet testbed. Experimental data show that significant improvements are observed in effective throughput and client response time, and that delay bounds on content access can be guaranteed with a very high probability.
195352079
The impact of network variabilities on TCP clocking schemes
8079480
A Systematic Study of Genetic Algorithms with Genotype Editing
This paper continues our systematic study of an RNA- editing computational model of Genetic Algorithms (GA). This model is constructed based on several genetic editing characteristics that are gle- aned from the RNA editing system as observed in several organisms. We have expanded the traditional Genetic Algorithm with artificial editing mechanisms as proposed in (11) and (12). The incorporation of editing mechanisms, which stochastically alter the information encoded in the genotype, provides a means for artificial agents with genetic descriptions to gain greater phenotypic plasticity, which may be environmentally re- gulated. The systematic study of this artificial genotype editing model has shed some light into the evolutionary implications of RNA editing and how to select proper genotype editors to design more robust GAs. Our results also show promising applications to complex real-world pro- blems. We expect that the framework here developed will both facilitate determining the evolutionary role of RNA editing in biology, and advance the current state of research in Evolutionary Computation.
1368534
Use of Computation-Unit Integrated Memories in High-Level Synthesis
High-level synthesis (HLS) of memory-intensive applications has featured several innovations in terms of enhancements made to the basic memory organization and data layout. However, increasing performance and energy demands faced by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are forcing designers to alter the fundamental architectural template of the HLS output, namely, a controller datapath associated with a memory subsystem (monolithic, partitioned, etc.). An architectural template for the HLS output that consists of a controller-datapath circuit associated with a memory subsystem into which computation units have been integrated is proposed. The enhanced memory subsystem is called computation-unit integrated memory (CIM). A CIM offers higher memory bandwidth (relative to what is offered through the system bus) to computation units present locally within it and reduces the overall communication between the memory subsystem and the controller datapath, thus providing a template highly suitable for deriving efficient implementations of memory-intensive applications. This paper addresses the challenge of providing a systematic synthesis framework for a CIM-based architecture. This framework can analyze the various tradeoffs involved in selecting suitable operations in a behavior for execution using a CIM and generate a high-performance low-overhead implementation. Efficient data reuse of register files have also been fully exploited to further improve system performance. Experiments with several behaviors indicate that an average performance improvement of 2.02times(a maximum of 2.70times) is possible with very low area overheads. The energy-delay product improves by an average of 2.5times(maximum of 3.8times)
14645139
Generation of distributed logic-memory architectures through high-level synthesis
With the increasing cost of on-chip global communication, high-performance designs for data-intensive applications require architectures that distribute hardware resources (computing logic, memories, interconnect, etc.) throughout the chip, while restricting computations and communications to geographic proximities. In this paper, we present a methodology for high-level synthesis (HLS) of distributed logic-memory architectures, i.e., architectures that have logic and memory distributed across several partitions in a chip. Conventional HLS tools are capable of extracting parallelism from a behavior for architectures that assume a monolithic controller/datapath communicating with a memory or memory hierarchy. This paper provides techniques to extend the synthesis frontier to more general architectures that can extract both coarse and fine-grained parallelism from data accesses and computations in a synergistic manner. Our methodology selects many possible ways of organizing data and computations, carefully examines the tradeoffs (i.e., communication overheads, synchronization costs, area overheads) in choosing one solution over another, and utilizes conventional HLS techniques for intermediate steps. We have evaluated the proposed framework on several benchmarks by generating register-transfer level (RTL) implementations using an existing commercial HLS tool with and without our enhancements, and by subjecting the resulting RTL circuits to logic synthesis and layout. The results show that circuits designed as distributed logic-memory architectures using our framework achieve significant (up to 5.3/spl times/, average of 3.5/spl times/) performance improvements over well-optimized conventional designs with small area overheads (up to 19.3%, 15.1% on average). At the same time, the reduction in the energy-delay product is by an average of 5.9/spl times/ (up to 11.0/spl times/).