Designing Reliable Systems with Unreliable Devices Challenges and Opportunities

Scaling devices toward nanometer-scale dimensions is rapidly exacerbating reliability problems in large-scale integrated ICs. While power has emerged as the key challenge for CMOS integration in the first decade of the 21^rst century, reliability likely raise to the level of first class design constraint in the next decade. New materials, process improvements and device engineering come to the rescue, but, as in the case of power, they are not sufficient to fully solve the problem. Hence, reliability is rapidly becoming a cross-cutting design challenge. Techniques and tools are required across the entire design flow, from circuits to software, as we must learn to build reliable systems with unreliable components. The paper focuses on hardware-centric approaches.