Identical designs of electronic circuits in deep-submicron technology show small parameter variations among different instances implemented on a die or in between dies. The resulting circuit variations have a strong impact on the quality of the design. This project plans to create an infrastructure for characterizing the circuit variability on a large population of Field Programmable Gate Array devices. The proposed infrastructure includes a small population of FPGA kits, as well as a web-based data-collection setup to support variability-experiments on hundreds of FPGAs at the same time, in collaboration with undergraduate students. The project will drive research into innovative applications of circuit variability, in particular into physically unclonable functions (PUF). In addition, a unique education opportunity is created to teach undergraduate students about the impact of variability on their design by making them participate in the experimental data collection. The proposed infrastructure will not only significantly enhance the PI's research in trustworthy circuit design, but also provide valuable variability data for the broader research community.
