Communications of the ACM
A Matter of Timing: New Strategies For Debugging Electronics
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Azadeh Davoodi is studying solutions for timing errors, which are electronic bugs that can occur after a chip is fabricated and can cause components to slow and take longer to execute operations. Davoodi says that due to their small size and large number of components, chips cannot realistically be completely void of bugs before fabrication.
"The nanoscale components in the chip are so small they can have weird physical behaviors that can only be detected after they are fabricated," he says.
Timing errors often are only revealed when specific operations are performed together, which makes testing tedious and difficult, because testers have to predict how a chip will be used. Davoodi's team is developing sensor components that can be built into the chip and will provide timing information, allowing manufacturers to solve errors faster. "We want to increase the timing observability inside the chip," he says.
From University of Wisconsin-Madison
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