The focus of the workshop was placed on major challenges and research opportunities in future system design and new approaches to deal with increasing variations and reliability problems (ageing, SEUs, ....) in the underlying components of modern systems. These issues are encountered for today’s workhorse CMOS technologies, but likely even more so for future fabrics (nanocomponents, molecular electronics etc.).
Starting from a technology perspective, the implications for design at circuit, system, and application level were adressed by 11 talks in four technical sessions. The topics showed the view of the academic research community as well as the view from industrial practice. The workshop placed a strong emphasis on interaction between all participants in order to share ideas and opinions. Two lively discussion rounds lead to the conclusion that there exists a growing need for new statistical approaches to deal with system reliability issues, for inter-diciplinary and cross-disciplinary research, for higher integration of lower and upper levels of design abstraction as well as for completely new out-of-the-box approaches.
The workshop was organized by Prof. Diana Marculescu, Prof. Radu Marculescu from Carnegie Mellon University, who visit TU München as guest professors, and Prof. Ulf Schlichtmann, head of the EDA institute at TU München. More than 30 experts from university and industry attended the workshop.