Sharif Digital Repository

Due to the tight power envelope, in the future technology nodes it is envisaged that not all cores in a many-core chip can be simultaneously powered-on (at full performance level). The power-gated cores are referred to as Dark Silicon. At the same time, growing reliability issues due to process variations and soft errors challenge the cost-effective deployment of future technology nodes. This paper presents a reliability management system for Dark Silicon chips (dsReliM) that optimizes for reliability of on-chip systems while jointly accounting for soft errors, process variations and the thermal design power (TDP) constraint. Towards the TDP-constrained reliability optimization, dsReliM... 

Due to aging, circuit reliability has become extraordinary challenging. Reliability-aware circuit design flows do virtually not exist and even research is in its infancy. In this paper, we propose to bring aging awareness to EDA tool flows based on so-called degradation-aware cell libraries. These libraries include detailed delay information of gates/cells under the impact that aging has on both threshold voltage (Vth) and carrier mobility (μ) of transistors. This is unlike state of the art which considers Vth only. We show how ignoring μ degradation leads to underestimating guard-bands by 19% on average. Our investigation revealed that the impact of aging is strongly dependent on the... 

Large-scale simulation of spiking neural networks on hardware with a remarkable resemblance to their mathematical models is a key objective of the neuromorphic discipline. This issue is, however, considerably resource-intensive due to the presence of nonlinear terms in neuron models. This paper proposes a novel uniform piecewise linear segmentation approach for nonlinear function evaluations. Employing the proposed approach, we present a uniform-segmented adaptive exponential neuron model capable of accurately producing various responses exhibited by the original model and suitable for efficient large-scale implementation. In contrast to previous nonuniform-segmented neuron models, the... 

Given the importance of reducing energy consumption and the challenge of heat generation in classic CMOS circuits, adiabatic circuits are believed as an appropriate alternative. Most of the adiabatic circuit families come with a dual-rail structure, which provides them with an inherent hardware redundancy. Although this redundancy could be used for improving their reliability, no studies have been previously conducted to exploit this feature. In this regard, in this paper, we show that by exploiting the inherent hardware redundancy in adiabatic circuits, their reliability could be improved, while imposing a relatively low amount of energy overhead. Subsequently, with utilizing the outcome... 

In this paper we have proposed an efficient method based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to design quantum cellular automata (QCA) circuits with minimum possible number of gates. The basic gates used to design these circuits are 2-input and 3-input NAND gates in addition to inverter gate. Due to use of these two types of NAND gates and their contradictory effects, a new fitness function has been defined. In addition, in this method we have used a type of mutation operator that can significantly help the GA to avoid local optima. The results show that the proposed approach is very efficient in deriving NAND based QCA designs  

Downscaling trend in CMOS technology on the one hand and reducing supply voltage of the circuits on the other hand, make devices more susceptive to soft errors such as SEU. Latch circuits are prone to be affected by SEUs. In this article, we propose a new circuit design of latch using redundancy with the aim of immunity against SEUs. According to simulation results, our design not only guaranties full immunity, but also has the advantage of occupying less area and consuming much less power and performance penalty in comparison with other SEU immune latches. The simulation results show that our solution has 65.76% reduction in power and about 50.65% reduction in propagation delay in... 

This paper presents a new architecture for a DLL based frequency synthesizer for wireless transceivers. Owing to its DLL based nature, the synthesizer generates the target frequencies with minimum phase noise. The proposed architecture takes the advantage of a combination of a frequency divider and an edge combiner to create the desired frequencies. As an example, the synthesizer is adopted to create the channel frequencies of French DVB-H/T standard. The circuit level design guidelines and power consumption trade-offs are presented. It was shown that for the mentioned standard a mere 6 stage delay line is sufficient. Simulation results confirm the analytical predictions  

This paper represents a systematic procedure of simulating charge pump based delay locked loops (DLLs). The presented procedure is based on the systematic modelling of the DLL components in Matlab simulink simulator. The system has been designed for 1Hz input clock signal that by changing the whole system scale, it can be used for every other input frequencies. The simulation results in Matlab and design considerations for DLL based frequency multiplier are presented  

In this paper, a new compact, low power and low voltage structure for CMOS analog multiplier is proposed. All of them are implemented using a compact circuit. The circuit is designed and analyzed in 0.18μm CMOS process model. Simulation results for the circuit with a 1.2V single supply show that it consumes only 25μw quiescent power with 2GHz bandwidth and 1.5% THD  

Security in mobile handsets of telecommunication standards such as GSM, Project 25 and TETRA is very important, especially when governments and military forces use handsets and telecommunication devices. Although telecommunication could be quite secure by using encryption, coding, tunneling and exclusive channel, attackers create new ways to bypass them without the knowledge of the legitimate user. In this paper we introduce a new, simple and economical circuit to warn the user in cases where the message is not encrypted because of manipulation by attackers or accidental damage. This circuit not only consumes very low power but also is created to sustain telecommunication devices in aspect... 

In this paper we study and present an in-depth analysis on the operability and the viability of a typical wireless optical CDMA (OCDMA) local area network. Three receiver structures for OCDMA systems, using optical orthogonal codes (OOC) with minimum auto and cross-correlations as signature sequence, namely, correlation, correlation with hard-limiter, and chip-level detection are studied and proposed for such a network. For the synchronization circuit design the performance of two algorithms for OOC based OCDMA networks, namely, simple serial-search and multiple-shift in the context of wireless OCDMA LAN are studied. Furthermore, we study a synchronization method based on matched filtering... 

A new low voltage bandgap reference (BGR) in CMOS technology, with high power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) is presented. The proposed circuit uses a regulated current mode structure and some feedback loops to reach a low voltage, low power and high PSRR voltage reference. The circuit was designed and simulated in 0.18um CMOS technology, with a power supply of 1.4 volt. The results show PSRR is 65dB at 1MHz and the output voltage variation versus temperature (-40 to 140) is less than 0.1%. This circuit shows robustness against process variation. ©2008 IEEE  

Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) has an unusual genotype representation which makes it more efficient than Genetic programming (GP) in digital circuit design problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, all methods used in evolutionary design of digital circuits deal with rugged, complex search space, which results in long running time to obtain successful evolution. Therefore, employing a method to guide evolution in these spaces can facilitate achieving more reasonable results. It has been claimed that a two-step evolutionary scenario caused by benefit and cost of learning called Baldwin effect can guide evolution in the biology and artificial life. Therefore, we have been motivated... 

In this work we introduce new model for energy-delay product and the performance of 80-nm SOI-CMOS circuits for the range of Vdd=0.1-1.5V and Vth=0-0.8V, are analyzed to find optimal Vdd and Vth BSIMSOI3.3 model (level 57) is used to verify the answers. We show that Energy-Delay Product (EDP) isn't appropriate metric for gate sizing problem. And a new design metric is introduced as a generalization of EDP. This metric is used to determine the transistor sizing for complex circuits based on the specified delay and energy constrains. In this case, unlike the conventional energy delay product metric, delay and energy can be considered with different emphasis. The complete design flowcharts and... 

An 8-bit CMOS folding-interpolating analog-todigital converter is presented. A new method for designing optimized averaging circuit is also described. Careful circuit design and layout leads to a high-speed (160 MSPS) and low power (70 mW in 2.5 V supply voltage) ADC. The ADC is successfully implemented in 0.25um CMOS digital process and it takes 1x1.4 mm2 silicon area. © 2005 IEEE