Project

RELY

Design for RELIABILITY of SoCs for Applications like Transportation, Medical, and Industrial Automation

Goal

The CATRENE / BMBF project RELY (grant number 01M3091) develops new methods for the design of reliable embedded systems for applications such as transportation, medical and automation. The OFFIS group "Analysis of Nanometer ICs" in cooperation with Infineon and TU Munich researches one of the most relevant aging effects of modern transistor technologies - the Bias Temperature Instability effect. This deteriorates over operating periods of years, the performance of the transistors. In traditional embedded systems this effect is not noticeable at first, until it finally comes to an almost simultaneous failure of many subsystems. Depending on the application, this may have different effects: While it is perfectly acceptable for communication devices to have a life span of just a few years, use of these new technologies would result to a virtually guaranteed failure in the automotive and aircraft application and thus to increased maintenance costs due to preventive replacement of systems. For implanted systems, which require that a maintenance can be avoided for many years, the latest technology without a new design techniques is almost unthinkable.