This Dagstuhl workshop is to bring together scientists from the research areas of Design Verification, Formal Methods, High-level Design, Manufacturing Testing, Robust System Design, and related disciplines in the context of integrated circuit manufacturing. The objective is to discuss major upcoming obstacles in the design, verification, and testing of robust systems and their potential solutions. Existing pre-silicon verification is insufficiently scalable, and today's manufacturing test methodologies may not be adequate in screening marginal and reliability failures. Bugs and defects that impact system correctness and/or security must be detected, localized, and corrected in the system environment, during post-silicon validation, or during system operation in the field. New methodologies, that are radical departures from today's practice and require multi-disciplinary effort spanning traditionally distinct research areas are to be discussed.
The outcome of this workshop is expected to influence US semiconductor industry by making connections between the academic and industrial researchers. The industry experts present at the workshop will also be instrumental in the benchmarking efforts critical to the research in the field. The workshop will also use the technical topic as a means to assess the value of joint collaborations between the relevant US and German scientific communities and explore various collaboration mechanisms that can be supported by the respective funding agencies. To this end, the workshop is co-sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG) as well.
Hardware failures are a growing concern as electronic systems become more complex, interconnected, and pervasive. Electronic systems continue to integrate increasingly more (heterogeneous) components to target a wide variety of critical applications such as health care, transportation, energy, finance and governance. The growing complexity trends make future electronic systems highly vulnerable to errors that can jeopardize correct operation and introduce security vulnerabilities. Existing test and validation methods cannot cope with such staggering system complexity. Hence, bugs and defects that jeopardize system correctness and/or security must be detected, localized and corrected during all phases of the design and manufacturing, including during system operation in the field. This workshop examined related major upcoming obstacles. There is an immediate need for systematic design methodologies to overcome these outstanding challenges for general system designs. These needed methodologies mark a radical departure from business as usual, and require a multi-disciplinary effort spanning the traditionally distinct research areas stated above. Collaborations between highly-specialized scientists are required such that their complementary expertise can be successfully utilized to address the basic research spanning multiple disciplines. This workshop brought together US and German scientific communities,a nd focused on the following two major aspects: 1. Identify the industrial trends and basic research challenges 2. Explore the value of collaborations between the German and US research communities, and how such collaborations can be supported by various funding agencies (DFG, NSF, SRC). Although the profiles of the German and US research communities have many commonalities, there also exist specific (complementary) differences that arise from specific industrial landscapes with corresponding research expertise.
