This book is a must-have reference to dry etching technology for semiconductors, which will enable engineers to develop new etching processes for further miniaturization and integration of semiconductor integrated circuits. The author describes the device manufacturing flow, and explains in which part of the flow dry etching is actually used. The content is designed as a practical guide for engineers working at chip makers, equipment suppliers and materials suppliers, and university students studying plasma, focusing on the topics they need most, such as detailed etching processes for each material (Si, SiO2, Metal etc) used in semiconductor devices, etching equipment used in manufacturing fabs, explanation of why a particular plasma source and gas chemistry are used for the etching of each material, and how to develop etching processes. The latest, key technologies are also described, such as 3D IC Etching, Dual Damascene Etching, Low-k Etching, Hi-k/Metal Gate Etching, FinFET Etching, Double Patterning etc.

This book presents advanced forensic detective control and obfuscation techniques for securing hardware IP cores by exploring beyond conventional technologies. The theme is important to researchers in various areas of specialization, because it encompasses the overlapping topics of EDA-CAD, hardware design security, VLSI design, IP core protection, optimization using evolutionary computing, system-on-chip design and finally application specific processor/hardware accelerator design for consumer electronics applications. The book begins by introducing forensic detective control and obfuscation mechanisms for hardware and IP core security. Further chapters cover hardware stenography, digital signature driven hardware authentication, fault-secured IP cores using digital signature-based watermarks, multi-level watermarking, cryptosystem-based multi-variable fingerprinting, multi-phase and hologram-based obfuscation, and security of functionally obfuscated DSP cores.

This book presents original studies describing the latest research and developments in the area of reliability and systems engineering. It helps the reader identifying gaps in the current knowledge and presents fruitful areas for further research in the field. Among others, this book covers reliability measures, reliability assessment of multi-state systems, optimization of multi-state systems, continuous multi-state systems, new computational techniques applied to multi-state systems and probabilistic and non-probabilistic safety assessment.

This book is devoted to embedded systems (ESs), which can now be found in practically all fields of human activity. Embedded systems are essentially a special class of computing systems designed for monitoring and controlling objects of the physical world. The book begins by discussing the distinctive features of ESs, above all their cybernetic-physical character, and how they can be designed to deliver the required performance with a minimum amount of hardware. In turn, it presents a range of design methodologies. Considerable attention is paid to the hardware implementation of computational algorithms. It is shown that different parts of complex ESs could be implemented using models of finite state machines (FSMs). Also, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are very often used to implement different hardware accelerators in ESs. The book pays considerable attention to design methods for FPGA-based FSMs, before the closing section turns to programmable logic controllers widely used in industry. This book will be interesting and useful for students and postgraduates in the area of Computer Science, as well as for designers of embedded systems. In addition, it offers a good point of departure for creating embedded systems for various spheres of human activity.

This book introduces Software Thermal Management (STM) as a means of reducing power consumption in a computing system in order to manage heat, improve component reliability and increase system safety. Readers will benefit from this pragmatic guide to the field of STM for embedded systems and its catalog of software power management techniques. Since thermal management is a key bottleneck in embedded systems design, this book focuses on root cause of heat in embedded systems: power. Since software has an enormous impact on power consumption in an embedded system, this book urges software engineers to manage heat effectively by understanding, categorizing and developing new ways to reduce static and dynamic power consumption. Whereas most books on thermal management describe mechanisms to remove heat, this book focuses on ways for software engineers to avoid generating heat in the first place.

PIC32 Microcontrollers and the Digilent chipKIT: Introductory to Advanced Projects will teach you about the architecture of 32-bit processors and the hardware details of the chipKIT development boards, with a focus on the chipKIT MX3 microcontroller development board. Once the basics are covered, the book then moves on to describe the MPLAB and MPIDE packages using the C language for program development. The final part of the book is based on project development, with techniques learned in earlier chapters, using projects as examples. Each projectwill have a practical approach, with in-depth descriptions and program flow-charts with block diagrams, circuit diagrams, a full program listing and a follow up on testing and further development. With this book you will learn: State-of-the-art PIC32 32-bit microcontroller architecture How to program 32-bit PIC microcontrollers using MPIDE, MPLAB, and C language Core features of the chipKIT series development boards How to develop simple projects using the chipKIT MX3 development board and Pmod interface cards how to develop advanced projects using the chipKIT MX3 development boards

This volume of the Lecture Notes in Mobility series contains papers written by speakers and poster presenters at the 21st International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA 2017) "Smart Systems Transforming the Automobile" that was held in Berlin, Germany in September 2017. The authors report about recent breakthroughs in electric and electronic components and systems, driver assistance and vehicle automation as well as safety and testing. Furthermore, legal aspects and impacts of connected and automated driving are covered. The target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners in industry and academia, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

Top-Down VLSI Design: From Architectures to Gate-Level Circuits and FPGAs represents a unique approach to learning digital design. Developed from more than 20 years teaching circuit design, Doctor Kaeslin's approach follows the natural VLSI design flow and makes circuit design accessible for professionals with a background in systems engineering or digital signal processing. It begins with hardware architecture and promotes a system-level view, first considering the type of intended application and letting that guide your design choices. Doctor Kaeslin presents modern considerations for handling circuit complexity, throughput, and energy efficiency while preserving functionality. The book focuses on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which along with FPGAs are increasingly used to develop products with applications in telecommunications, IT security, biomedical, automotive, and computer vision industries. Topics include field-programmable logic, algorithms, verification, modeling hardware, synchronous clocking, and more.

This research monograph focuses on the design of arithmetic circuits in Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QCA). Using the fact that the 3-input majority gate is a primitive in QCA, the book sets out to discover hitherto unknown properties of majority logic in the context of arithmetic circuit designs. The pursuit for efficient adders in QCA takes two forms. One involves application of the new results in majority logic to existing adders. The second involves development of a custom adder for QCA technology. A QCA adder named as hybrid adder is proposed and it is shown that it outperforms existing multi-bit adders with respect to area and delay. The work is extended to the design of a low-complexity multiplier for signed numbers in QCA. Furthermore the book explores two aspects unique to QCA technology, namely thermal robustness and the role of interconnects. In addition, the book introduces the reader to QCA layout design and simulation using QCADesigner. Features & Benefits: This research-based book: *Introduces the reader to Quantum Dot Cellular Automata, an emerging nanotechnology. *Explores properties of majority logic. *Demonstrates application of the properties to design efficient arithmetic circuits. *Guides the reader towards layout design and simulation in QCADesigner.

Networks-on-Chip: From Implementations to Programming Paradigms provides a thorough and bottom-up exploration of the whole NoC design space in a coherent and uniform fashion, from low-level router, buffer and topology implementations, to routing and flow control schemes, to co-optimizations of NoC and high-level programming paradigms.

This lecture is intended for an advanced course on computer architecture, suitable for graduate students or senior undergrads who want to specialize in the area of computer architecture and Networks-on-Chip. It is also intended for practitioners in the industry in the area of microprocessor design, especially the many-core processor design with a network-on-chip. The graduates can learn many practical and theoretical lessons from this course, and also can be motivated to delve further into the ideas and designs proposed in this book. The industrial engineers can refer this book to make practicing tradeoffs as well. The graduates and engineers focus on off-chip network design can also refer this book for deadlock-free routing algorithm designs.
Provides thorough and insightful exploration of NoC design space. Description from low-level logic implementations to co-optimizations of high-level program paradigms and NoCs.The coherent and uniform description fashion offers the readers a clear, quick and efficient exploration of NoC design spaceCovers many novel and exciting research ideas, which encourage researchers to further delve into these topics.Presents both engineering and theoretical contributions. The detailed description of the router, buffer and topology implementations, comparisons and analysis are of high engineering value.

This book describes the state-of-the art of industrial and academic research in the architectural design of heterogeneous, multi/many-core processors. The authors describe methods and tools to enable next-generation embedded and high-performance heterogeneous processors to confront cost-effectively the inevitable variations by providing Dependable-Performance: correct functionality and timing guarantees throughout the expected lifetime of a platform under thermal, power, and energy constraints. Various aspects of the reliability problem are discussed, at both the circuit and architecture level, the intelligent selection of knobs and monitors in multicore platforms, and systematic design methodologies. The authors demonstrate how new techniques have been applied in real case studies from different applications domain and report on results and conclusions of those experiments. Enables readers to develop performance-dependable heterogeneous multi/many-core architectures Describes system software designs that support high performance dependability requirements Discusses and analyzes low level methodologies to tradeoff conflicting metrics, i.e. power, performance, reliability and thermal management Includes new application design guidelines to improve performance dependability

This book deals with the challenge of exploiting ambient vibrational energy which can be used to power small and low-power electronic devices, e.g. wireless sensor nodes. Generally, particularly for low voltage amplitudes, low-loss rectification is required to achieve high conversion efficiency. In the special case of piezoelectric energy harvesting, pulsed charge extraction has the potential to extract more power compared to a single rectifier. For this purpose, a fully autonomous CMOS integrated interface circuit for piezoelectric generators which fulfills these requirements is presented. Due to these key properties enabling universal usage, other CMOS designers working in the field of energy harvesting will be encouraged to use some of the shown structures for their own implementations. The book is unique in the sense that it highlights the design process from scratch to the final chip. Hence, it gives the designer a comprehensive guide of how to (i) setup an appropriate harvester model to get realistic simulation results, (ii) design the integrated circuits for low power operation, (iii) setup a laboratory measurement environment in order to extensively characterize the chip in combination with the real harvester and finally, (iv) interpret the simulation/measurement results in order to improve the chip performance. Since the dimensions of all devices (transistors, resistors etc.) are given, readers and other designers can easily re-use the presented circuit concepts.

This book analyzes energy and reliability as major challenges faced by designers of computing frameworks in the nanometer technology regime. The authors describe the existing solutions to address these challenges and then reveal a new reconfigurable computing platform, which leverages high-density nanoscale memory for both data storage and computation to maximize the energy-efficiency and reliability. The energy and reliability benefits of this new paradigm are illustrated and the design challenges are discussed. Various hardware and software aspects of this exciting computing paradigm are described, particularly with respect to hardware-software co-designed frameworks, where the hardware unit can be reconfigured to mimic diverse application behavior. Finally, the energy-efficiency of the paradigm described is compared with other, well-known reconfigurable computing platforms.

This book is intended for systems engineers, hybrid and monolithic power amplifier designers, engineers involved in the development of CAD programs, academics, and industrial and goverment researchers. The book is devoted exclusively to high power GaAs FET amplifier design, covering the subject comprehensively, including FET design, circuit design, thermal and reliability analysis, and systems applications.

From traditional techniques such as FSK, BPSK, QPSK and QAM to state-of-the-art techniques such as MSK, CPM and MHPM and more, this text covers the complete range of digital modulation methods. It discusses the historical background of digital modulation, and examines operation principles, symbol and bit error performance, and spectral characteristics. It also includes block diagrams and/or circuits of modulators, demodulators, carrier recovery, clock recovery and comparison with other schemes. In its comprehensive overview of digital modulation applications, it seeks to offer a practical understanding of conventional, fixed microwave terrestrial communications, mobile wireless, and mobile satellite communications.

Digital Hardware Testing presents realistic transistor-level fault models and testing methods for all types of circuits. The discussion details design-for-testability and built-in self-test methods, with coverage of boundary scan and emerging technologies such as partial scan, cross check, and circular self-test-path.

This book opens the door to a new interesting and ambitious world of reversible and quantum computing research. It presents the state of the art required to travel around that world safely. Top world universities, companies and government institutions are in a race of developing new methodologies, algorithms and circuits on reversible logic, quantum logic, reversible and quantum computing and nano-technologies. In this book, twelve reversible logic synthesis methodologies are presented for the first time in a single literature with some new proposals. Also, the sequential reversible logic circuitries are discussed for the first time in a book. Reversible logic plays an important role in quantum computing. Any progress in the domain of reversible logic can be directly applied to quantum logic. One of the goals of this book is to show the application of reversible logic in quantum computing. A new implementation of wavelet and multiwavelet transforms using quantum computing is performed for this purpose. Researchers in academia or industry and graduate students, who work in logic synthesis, quantum computing, nano-technology, and low power VLSI circuit design, will be interested in this book.

This volume of the Lecture Notes in Mobility series contains papers written by speakers at the 22nd International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA 2018) "Smart Systems for Clean, Safe and Shared Road Vehicles" that was held in Berlin, Germany in September 2018. The authors report about recent breakthroughs in electric and electronic components and systems, driver assistance, vehicle automation and electrification as well as data, clouds and machine learning. Furthermore, innovation aspects and impacts of connected and automated driving are covered. The target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners in industry and academia, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

This book serves as a single-source reference to Current Conveyors and their use in modern Analog Circuit Design. The authors describe the various types of current conveyors discovered over the past 45 years, details of all currently available, off-the-shelf integrated circuit current conveyors, and implementations of current conveyors using other, off-the-shelf IC building blocks. Coverage includes prominent bipolar/CMOS/Bi-CMOS architectures of current conveyors, as well as all varieties of starting from third generation current conveyors to universal current conveyors, their implementations and applications. *Describes all commercially available off-the-shelf IC current conveyors, as well as hardware implementations of current conveyors using other off-the-shelf ICs; * Describes numerous variants of current conveyors evolved over the past forty five years; * Describes a number of Bipolar/CMOS/Bi-CMOS architectures of current conveyors, along with their characteristic features; * Includes a comprehensive collection of over 400 application circuits using current conveyors; * Provides an exhaustive catalogue of current conveyor-based circuits for a variety of applications, including instrumentation amplifiers, precision rectifiers, simulated inductors, filters, sinusoidal oscillators, waveform generators, chaos generators, analog multipliers/dividers, memristive emulators and numerous others.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to spintronics-based computing for the next generation of ultra-low power/highly reliable logic. It will cover aspects from device to system-level, including magnetic memory cells, device modeling, hybrid circuit structure, design methodology, CAD tools, and technological integration methods. This book is accessible to a variety of readers and little or no background in magnetism and spin electronics are required to understand its content. The multidisciplinary team of expert authors from circuits, devices, computer architecture, CAD and system design reveal to readers the potential of spintronics nanodevices to reduce power consumption, improve reliability and enable new functionality.

This follow-up to the first volume presents an integrated survey of the most recent research, engineering development and commercial application of amorphous and microcrystalline semiconductor devices, with emphasis on materials properties and their relationship to performance. A complete guide to the past, present and future of these devices, and a reference on the state-of-the-art of amorphous and microcrystalline devices in modern large-area microelectronics.

This book provides techniques to tackle the design challenges raised by the increasing diversity and complexity of emerging, heterogeneous architectures for embedded systems. It describes an approach based on techniques from software engineering called aspect-oriented programming, which allow designers to control today's sophisticated design tool chains, while maintaining a single application source code. Readers are introduced to the basic concepts of an aspect-oriented, domain specific language that enables control of a wide range of compilation and synthesis tools in the partitioning and mapping of an application to a heterogeneous (and possibly multi-core) target architecture. Several examples are presented that illustrate the benefits of the approach developed for applications from avionics and digital signal processing. Using the aspect-oriented programming techniques presented in this book, developers can reuse extensive sections of their designs, while preserving the original application source-code, thus promoting developer productivity as well as architecture and performance portability. Describes an aspect-oriented approach for the compilation and synthesis of applications targeting heterogeneous embedded computing architectures. Includes examples using an integrated tool chain for compilation and synthesis. Provides validation and evaluation for targeted reconfigurable heterogeneous architectures. Enables design portability, given changing target devices* Allows developers to maintain a single application source code when targeting multiple architectures.

Increasing performance demands in integrated circuits, together with limited energy budgets, force IC designers to find new ways of saving power. One innovative way is the presented adaptive voltage scaling scheme, which tunes the supply voltage according to the present process, voltage and temperature variations as well as aging. The voltage is adapted "on the fly" by means of in-situ delay monitors to exploit unused timing margin, produced by state-of-the-art worst-case designs. This book discusses the design of the enhanced in-situ delay monitors and the implementation of the complete control-loop comprising the monitors, a control-logic and an on-chip voltage regulator. An analytical Markov-based model of the control-loop is derived to analyze its robustness and stability. Variation-Aware Adaptive Voltage Scaling for Digital CMOS Circuits provides an in-depth assessment of the proposed voltage scaling scheme when applied to an arithmetic and an image processing circuit. This book is written for engineers interested in adaptive techniques for low-power CMOS circuits.

This book investigates and discusses the hardware design and implementation to achieve smart air interfaces with a reduced number of Radio Frequency (RF) transmitter and receiver chains, or even with a single reconfigurable RF-Frontend in the user terminal. Various hardware challenges are identified and addressed to enable the implementation of autonomous reconfigurable RF-Frontend architectures. Such challenges are (i) the conception of a transceiver with wide tuning range of at least up to 6 GHz, (ii) the system integration of reconfigurable technologies targeting current compact devices that demand voltages up to 100 V for adaptive controlling and (iii) the realization of a multiband and multistandard antenna module employing agile components to provide flexible frequency coverage. A solid design of a reconfigurable frontend is proposed from the RF part to the digital baseband. The system integration of different components in the reconfigurable RF-Frontend of a portable-oriented device architecture is demonstrated.