Desigining Circuits from Imperfect Components in VISI Giga-scale Technologies

Abstract

The evolution of the integrated circuit technology during the last 3 decades has been based on an increasing accuracy of the manufacturing process. With this principle and by using a quality control at the end of the production line (Test Technology) the semiconductor industry has reached very high productivity levels. However, with technology reaching critical sizes ( < 65 nm) the manufacturing control is starting to fail and new design principles have to be introduced to be able to produce functional chips from low quality components. In this article two scenarios partially addressing the problem with gradual introduction of redundancy are considered: the scenario of the era at the end of the CMOS Moore's Law and the expected next scenario of nanoelectronic technology using new emergent devices. In the paper techniques for the design of robust electronic systems in spite of the low quality of components are presented for the two scenarios.