Hardware Dependability

Integrated circuits (ICs) are integral part of any electronics system we see around. Developing, designing and deploying of such chips is by far more than just getting your SPICE simulation showing a correct behavior. Ensuring high quality, reliable and secure manufactured chips is a critical and crucial step in the whole IC process. A chip targeting children toys could cost 0.5€ while a similar chip (in terms of functionality) could cost 100X to 1000X more when used for critical application such as military. Hardware dependability (e.g., quality, reliability, security) is a key differentiator.

This course will introduce you to hardware dependability concepts and aspects. You will learn that ensuring such dependability needs the design of appropriate countermeasures, both during the design phase (i.e., part of the design) and in field/ during the lifetime of the application (i.e., continue monitoring and acting when needed). The course will teach you how to guarantee that a chip that may consists of billions of transistors and connections can be tested in less than one second, why the warranty you get for your phone is just two years rather than e.g., 5 years, how hackers can retrieve secret information from your device or smart phone and how to prevent it from happening, etc.

Technically, the topics that will be covered are: a) Test/Quality: manufacturing defects, fault modeling, test development, design-for-testability, memory test, build-in-self test, etc; b) Reliability: reliability failure mechanism, modeling, design-for-reliability, testing, etc.; c) Security: hardware attacks and countermeasures, IP attacks, functionality Attacks, Data Attack, design-for-Security, etc.