2016 Technical Excellence Award
Presented to Professor Chris Kim From the University of Minnesota
Established in 1991, the Technical Excellence Award is an incentive and recognition program for research of exceptional value to SRC members. This prestigious award is shared equally among key contributors for innovative technology that significantly enhances the productivity and competitiveness of the semiconductor industry.
Essential aspects that are considered in the selection process include creativity, relevance to SRC research objectives, value to industry, and technology transfer.
This year, the 2016 honor, along with a $5000 monetary award, is presented to Professor Chris Kim from the University of Minnesota for "Silicon Odometer for Transistor Aging Monitoring".
Professor Kim’s nomination was submitted by Vijay Reddy from Texas Instruments with support from IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm.
It is interesting to note that Prof. Kim was supported as an SRC student when pursuing his graduate studies at Purdue and that his advisor, Prof. Kaushik Roy, received the 2015 SRC Aristotle award.
As many in this room are aware, long-term reliability issues are a major manufacturability concern in leading edge CMOS designs. As the use of electronics becomes more pervasive in our every day lives, this concern will only increase, and at a dramatic rate, as the dependence on such devices increases. An extremely critical aspect of building reliable systems is the accurate collection of real data from real circuits. The silicon odometer technology developed by Prof. Kim and his students alters the way circuit and system designers understand and provide compensation for system aging. The advances may be summarized into three building block topics of reliable system design. The first is the efficient characterization of circuit aging during process development; the second is the capability to perform in-field monitoring of aging effects; and the third is to provide a mechanism to carry out real-time adjustments to compensate for aging effects.
As was written in one endorsement letter, "Professor Kim’s work on the GRC Silicon Odometer project has made him, without peer, the top person worldwide in the design and characterization of specialized circuits for reliability monitoring."
It is with tremendous pleasure that I present the 2016 SRC Technical Excellence Award to Prof. Chris Kim.
View the press release.
