Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
- Creators: Yu, Hongbin
Description
Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is a leading aging mechanism in modern digital and analog circuits. Recent NBTI data exhibits an excessive amount of randomness and fast recovery, which are difficult to be handled by conventional power-law model (tn). Such discrepancies further pose the challenge on long-term reliability prediction under statistical variations and Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) in real circuit operation. To overcome these barriers, the modeling effort in this work (1) practically explains the aging statistics due to randomness in number of traps with log(t) model, accurately predicting the mean and variance shift; (2) proposes cycle-to-cycle model (from the first-principle of trapping) to handle aging under multiple supply voltages, predicting the non-monotonic behavior under DVS (3) presents a long-term model to estimate a tight upper bound of dynamic aging over multiple cycles, and (4) comprehensively validates the new set of aging models with 65nm statistical silicon data. Compared to previous models, the new set of aging models capture the aging variability and the essential role of the recovery phase under DVS, reducing unnecessary guard-banding during the design stage. With CMOS technology scaling, design for reliability has become an important step in the design cycle, and increased the need for efficient and accurate aging simulation methods during the design stage. NBTI induced delay shifts in logic paths are asymmetric in nature, as opposed to averaging effect due to recovery assumed in traditional aging analysis. Timing violations due to aging, in particular, are very sensitive to the standby operation regime of a digital circuit. In this report, by identifying the critical moments in circuit operation and considering the asymmetric aging effects, timing violations under NBTI effect are correctly predicted. The unique contributions of the simulation flow include: (1) accurate modeling of aging induced delay shift due to threshold voltage (Vth) shift using only the delay dependence on supply voltage from cell library; (2) simulation flow for asymmetric aging analysis is proposed and conducted at critical points in circuit operation; (3) setup and hold timing violations due to NBTI aging in logic and clock buffer are investigated in sequential circuits and (4) proposed framework is tested in VLSI applications such DDR memory circuits. This methodology is comprehensively demonstrated with ISCAS89 benchmark circuits using a 45nm Nangate standard cell library characterized using predictive technology models. Our proposed design margin assessment provides design insights and enables resilient techniques for mitigating digital circuit aging.
ContributorsVelamala, Jyothi Bhaskarr (Author) / Cao, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Clark, Lawrence (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Yu, Hongbin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In UAVs and parking lots, it is typical to first collect an enormous number of pixels using conventional imagers. This is followed by employment of expensive methods to compress by throwing away redundant data. Subsequently, the compressed data is transmitted to a ground station. The past decade has seen the emergence of novel imagers called spatial-multiplexing cameras, which offer compression at the sensing level itself by providing an arbitrary linear measurements of the scene instead of pixel-based sampling. In this dissertation, I discuss various approaches for effective information extraction from spatial-multiplexing measurements and present the trade-offs between reliability of the performance and computational/storage load of the system. In the first part, I present a reconstruction-free approach to high-level inference in computer vision, wherein I consider the specific case of activity analysis, and show that using correlation filters, one can perform effective action recognition and localization directly from a class of spatial-multiplexing cameras, called compressive cameras, even at very low measurement rates of 1\%. In the second part, I outline a deep learning based non-iterative and real-time algorithm to reconstruct images from compressively sensed (CS) measurements, which can outperform the traditional iterative CS reconstruction algorithms in terms of reconstruction quality and time complexity, especially at low measurement rates. To overcome the limitations of compressive cameras, which are operated with random measurements and not particularly tuned to any task, in the third part of the dissertation, I propose a method to design spatial-multiplexing measurements, which are tuned to facilitate the easy extraction of features that are useful in computer vision tasks like object tracking. The work presented in the dissertation provides sufficient evidence to high-level inference in computer vision at extremely low measurement rates, and hence allows us to think about the possibility of revamping the current day computer systems.
ContributorsKulkarni, Kuldeep Sharad (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Sankaranarayanan, Aswin (Committee member) / LiKamWa, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Characterization of standard cells is one of the crucial steps in the IC design. Scaling of CMOS technology has lead to timing un-certainties such as that of cross coupling noise due to interconnect parasitic, skew variation due to voltage jitter and proximity effect of multiple inputs switching (MIS). Due to increased operating frequency and process variation, the probability of MIS occurrence and setup / hold failure within a clock cycle is high. The delay variation due to temporal proximity of MIS is significant for multiple input gates in the standard cell library. The shortest paths are affected by MIS due to the lack of averaging effect. Thus, sensitive designs such as that of SRAM row and column decoder circuits have high probability for MIS impact. The traditional static timing analysis (STA) assumes single input switching (SIS) scenario which is not adequate enough to capture gate delay accurately, as the delay variation due to temporal proximity of the MIS is ~15%-45%. Whereas, considering all possible scenarios of MIS for characterization is computationally intensive with huge data volume. Various modeling techniques are developed for the characterization of MIS effect. Some techniques require coefficient extraction through multiple spice simulation, and do not discuss speed up approach or apply models with complicated algorithms to account for MIS effect. The STA flow accounts for process variation through uncertainty parameter to improve product yield. Some of the MIS delay variability models account for MIS variation through table look up approach, resulting in huge data volume or do not consider propagation of RAT in the design flow. Thus, there is a need for a methodology to model MIS effect with less computational resource, and integration of such effect into design flow without trading off the accuracy. A finite-point based analytical model for MIS effect is proposed for multiple input logic gates and similar approach is extended for setup/hold characterization of sequential elements. Integration of MIS variation into design flow is explored. The proposed methodology is validated using benchmark circuits at 45nm technology node under process variation. Experimental results show significant reduction in runtime and data volume with ~10% error compared to that of SPICE simulation.
ContributorsSubramaniam, Anupama R (Author) / Cao, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Roveda, Janet (Committee member) / Yu, Hongbin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (sub-THz) systems aim to utilize the large bandwidth available at these frequencies. This has the potential to enable several future applications that require high data rates, such as autonomous vehicles and digital twins. These systems, however, have several challenges that need to be addressed to realize their gains in practice. First, they need to deploy large antenna arrays and use narrow beams to guarantee sufficient receive power. Adjusting the narrow beams of the large antenna arrays incurs massive beam training overhead. Second, the sensitivity to blockages is a key challenge for mmWave and THz networks. Since these networks mainly rely on line-of-sight (LOS) links, sudden link blockages highly threaten the reliability of the networks. Further, when the LOS link is blocked, the network typically needs to hand off the user to another LOS basestation, which may incur critical time latency, especially if a search over a large codebook of narrow beams is needed. A promising way to tackle both these challenges lies in leveraging additional side information such as visual, LiDAR, radar, and position data. These sensors provide rich information about the wireless environment, which can be utilized for fast beam and blockage prediction. This dissertation presents a machine-learning framework for sensing-aided beam and blockage prediction. In particular, for beam prediction, this work proposes to utilize visual and positional data to predict the optimal beam indices. For the first time, this work investigates the sensing-aided beam prediction task in a real-world vehicle-to-infrastructure and drone communication scenario. Similarly, for blockage prediction, this dissertation proposes a multi-modal wireless communication solution that utilizes bimodal machine learning to perform proactive blockage prediction and user hand-off. Evaluations on both real-world and synthetic datasets illustrate the promising performance of the proposed solutions and highlight their potential for next-generation communication and sensing systems.
ContributorsCharan, Gouranga (Author) / Alkhateeb, Ahmed (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Michelusi, Nicolò (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024