April 22-24, 2013

Jörg Henkel, et al.

Organizers:
Wolfgang Kunz, University of Kaiserslautern
Subhasish Mitra, Stanford University

Executive Board:
Sankar Basu , National Science Foundation (NSF)
Jörg Henkel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Alan Hu, University of British Columbia
David Yeh, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)
Wolfgang Kunz, University of Kaiserslautern
Sharad Malik , Princeton University
Subhasish Mitra, Stanford University
Klaus Wefelmeier, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Hans-Joachim Wunderlich, University of Stuttgart

Objective and Topic: This workshop brought together US and German scientific communities from the research areas of Design Verification, Formal Methods, Manufacturing Testing, Robust System Design, Security, and the related areas of micro- and nano-electronic design automation.

Hardware failures are a growing concern as electronic systems become more complex, interconnected, and pervasive. Electronic systems continue to integrate increasingly more (heterogeneous) components to target a wide variety of critical applications such as health care, transportation, energy, finance and governance. For coming generations of silicon ICs with remarkably small geometries, several failure mechanisms, largely benign in the past, are becoming visible at the system-level. Finally, with the slowdown of Dennard scaling, improvements in energy efficiency of electronic systems come at the price of significant complexity: increasing amounts of cores, uncore components, and accelerators; increasing degrees of adaptivity; and increasing levels of heterogeneous integration. These trends make future systems highly vulnerable to errors that can jeopardize correct operation, cause early- life failures, or introduce security vulnerabilities. Existing test and validation methods cannot cope with such staggering system complexity. Hence, bugs and defects that jeopardize system correctness and/or security must be detected, localized and corrected during all phases of the design and manufacturing, including during system operation in the field. This workshop examined related major upcoming obstacles. Some ad hoc approaches to address these challenges have started to appear in specific design domains; however, there is an immediate need for systematic design methodologies to overcome these outstanding challenges for general system designs. These needed methodologies mark a radical departure from business as usual, and require a multi- disciplinary effort spanning the traditionally distinct research areas stated above. Collaborations between highly-specialized scientists are required such that their complementary expertise can be successfully utilized to address the basic research spanning multiple disciplines. This workshop focused on the following two major aspects: 1. Identify the industrial trends and basic research challenges at the boundaries between the following research areas:

• high-level design
• pre-silicon verification
• reliable design
• post-silicon validation
• manufacturing testing

2. Explore the value of collaborations between the German and US research communities, and how such collaborations can be supported by various funding agencies (DFG, NSF, SRC). Although the profiles of the German and US research communities have many commonalities, there also exist specific (complementary) differences that arise from specific industrial landscapes with corresponding research expertise.