Abstract
As feature sizes scale down to deep sub-micron, crosstalk, heat-induced hotspots and dynamic voltage drop (IR-drop) effects have become more and more important. In this thesis, we will study how to enhance the reliability of integrated circuit design by solving the above-mentioned problems. First, to eliminate the crosstalk effect, we propose a de-assembler/assembler technique to eliminate undesirable crosstalk effects on bus transmission. By taking advantage of the prefetch process, where the instruction/data fetch rate is always higher than the instruction/data commit rate, the proposed method incurs almost no penalty in terms of dynamic instruction count. Second, to remove the heat-induced hotspot, we propose a static thermal management technique at compiler level. Two techniques are proposed. The first one is to balance the temperature of the register file by taking both spatial and temporal thermal information into consideration during register binding. The second one is to improve forwarding methods including forwarding-aware architecture and instruction scheduling to reduce the access count of register file. Finally, to reduce the dynamic voltage drop (IR-drop) effect, we propose an X-filling approach during at-speed test. In this work, we take the spatial information into consideration in our approach and we perform a more efficient backward-propagation X-filling method as compared to previous work using forward-propagation.