Keynote: How Dependable is our Electronic Infrastructure?

Sani Nassif (Radyalis, US)

Abstract

Humankind is completely dependent on an electronic infrastructure encompassing data centers, cloud services, radio and wired networks, as well as personal computing devices. The brief hiccup that occurred during the COVID pandemic in the semiconductor supply chain raised numerous flags and has energized governments and funding agencies to return to active support of Silicon R&D and manufacturing. But hidden behind a facade of always-on, always-available, always-correct that the public believes in, there are numerous fault and reliability mechanisms that are getting worse with technology scaling. While some effort has already been invested in this area, more is needed -especially at the application level- in order to ensure that our Silicon “addiction” will continue to be beneficial for us. This talk will explore this topic, give some examples of areas where closer industry/academia coupling would be helpful, and introduce Van Gogh as a system-on-chip designer.

Curriculum Vitae

Sani Nassif received his PhD from Carnegie-Mellon university in the eighties. He worked for ten years at Bell Laboratories on various aspects of design and technology coupling. He then joined IBM Research where he was for eighteen years working on DFM in various technical and management roles. In 2014 he formed Radyalis to apply EDA techniques to Cancer Radiation Therapy. Sani is a fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and an IBM master inventor with 70+ patents. He was the president of IEEE CEDA in 2014-2016, and has published and presented widely.