Robust Design of DSP Functional Units for Wireless Communication

Principal Investigator
Josephine Ammer Bolotski

Sponsor(s)
University of California, Berkeley

Award Period
07/06/2006 - 08/31/2009

Abstract
Process variation is an increasingly important problem in semiconductor devices as dimensions are scaled. New architectures and design methodologies are required to address these variations without incurring significant performance or power degradation. Communication devices are ideal candidates in which to explore the effects of process variation because robustness to noise is already included in their design paradigm. The challenge is to develop architectures that express process variation as simply another type of noise. We propose a three-tiered approach to develop architectures that achieve this "process variation scalability". An existing design exploration framework for power/performance tradeoffs in communication components can be extended to include these new robustness tradeoffs. This research will serve as a launching pad to enable exploration of much broader classes of robust computational systems.

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