Modern electronics depend on nanoscaled technologies that present new challenges in terms of testing and diagnostics. Memories are particularly prone to defects since they exploit the technology limits to get the highest density. This book is an invaluable guide to the testing and diagnostics of the latest generation of SRAM, one of the most widely applied types of memory. Classical methods for testing memory are designed to handle the so-called "static faults," but these test solutions ar...

Many systems, devices and appliances used routinely in everyday life, ranging from cell phones to cars, contain significant amounts of software that is not directly visible to the user and is therefore called "embedded". For coordinating the various software components and allowing them to communicate with each other, support software is needed, called an operating system (OS). Because embedded software must function in real time (RT), a RTOS is needed. This book describes a formally devel...

This textbook is written for junior/senior undergraduate and first-year graduate students in the electrical and computer engineering departments.Using PSoC mixed-signal array design, the authors define the characteristics of embedd design, embedded mixed-signal architectures, and top-down design. Optimized implementations of these designs are included to illustrate the theory. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter for practice. Topics covered include the hardware and so...

Uncertainty in key parameters within a chip and between different chips in the deep sub micron area plays a more and more important role. As a result, manufacturing process spreads need to be considered during the design process. Quantitative methodology is needed to ensure faultless functionality, despite existing process variations within given bounds, during product development. This book presents the technological, physical, and mathematical fundamentals for a design paradigm shift, fr...

This book presents new concepts, techniques and promising programming models for designing software for chips with "many" (hundreds to thousands) processor cores. Given the scale of parallelism inherent to these chips, software designers face new challenges in terms of operating systems, middleware and applications. This will serve as an invaluable, single-source reference to the state-of-the-art in programming many-core chips. Coverage includes many-core architectures, operating systems, ...

As embedded systems become more complex, designers face a number of challenges at different levels: they need to boost performance, while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, they need to reuse existent software code, and at the same time they need to take advantage of the extra logic available in the chip, represented by multiple processors working together. This book describes several strategies to achieve such different and interrelated goals, by the use of adaptability. Cover...

Yield and reliability of memories have degraded with device and voltage scaling in the nano-scale era, due to ever-increasing hard/soft errors and device parameter variations. This book systematically describes these yield and reliability issues in terms of mathematics and engineering, as well as an array of repair techniques, based on the authors’ long careers in developing memories and low-voltage CMOS circuits. Nanoscale Memory Repair gives a detailed explanation of the various yield mo...

Managing the power consumption of circuits and systems is now considered one of the most important challenges for the semiconductor industry. Elaborate power management strategies, such as dynamic voltage scaling, clock gating or power gating techniques, are used today to control the power dissipation during functional operation. The usage of these strategies has various implications on manufacturing test, and power-aware test is therefore increasingly becoming a major consideration during...

Embedded processors are the heart of embedded systems. Reconfigurable embedded processors comprise an extended instruction set that is implemented using a reconfigurable fabric (similar to a field-programmable gate array, FPGA). This book presents novel concepts, strategies, and implementations to increase the run-time adaptivity of reconfigurable embedded processors. Concepts and techniques are presented in an accessible, yet rigorous context. A complex, realistic H.264 video encoder appl...

This book provides readers with a comprehensive review of the state of the art in error control for Network on Chip (NOC) links. Coverage includes detailed description of key issues in NOC error control faced by circuit and system designers, as well as practical error control techniques to minimize the impact of these errors on system performance.

The application of CMOS circuits and ASIC VLSI systems to problems in medicine and system biology has led to the emergence of Bio/CMOS Interfaces and Co-Design as an exciting and rapidly growing area of research. The mutual inter-relationships between VLSI-CMOS design and the biophysics of molecules interfacing with silicon and/or onto metals has led to the emergence of the interdisciplinary engineering approach to Bio/CMOS interfaces. This new approach, facilitated by 3D circuit design an...

Memory Design Techniques for Low Energy Embedded Systems centers one of the most outstanding problems in chip design for embedded application. It guides the reader through different memory organizations and technologies and it reviews the most successful strategies for optimizing them in the power and performance plane.