Past research projects

CMOS semiconductor technology is nowadays the dominant technology for integrated circuit manufacturing, and it is expected that it will continue to be so for the next five years. However, the continuing trends of device scaling and increase in complexity towards terascale system on chip level of integration...

Technology projections indicate that future electronic devices will keep shrinking, being faster and consuming less energy per operation. In the next decade, a single chip will be able to perform trillions of operations per second and provide trillions of bytes per second in off-chip bandwidth. This is the so called Terascale Computing era, where terascale performance will be mainstream, available in personal computer, and being the building block of large data centers with petascale computing capabilities. However, these smaller devices will be much more susceptible to faults and its performance will exhibit a significant degree of variability...

The project targets the optimisation of manufacturability and the reduction of systematic variations in nanometer technologies through exploitation of regularity at the architectural, structural, and geometrical levels.

The influence of process variations is becoming extremely critical for nanoCMOS technology nodes, due to geometric tolerances and manufacturing non-idealities (such as edge or surface roughness, or the fluctuation of the number of doping atoms)...

The project acronym (MARAGDA) stands for “Multilevel approach to the reliability-aware design of analog and digital integrated circuits“. The project goal is to develop a design methodology (covering from fabrication up to applications) that can efficiently tackle variability and aging in modern nanoscale CMOS technologies.