On pedagogy of nanometric circuit reliability

Fast-shrinking dimensions of semiconductor devices are expected to reach sub-10 nm scale in a few years. Although smaller in size and lower in power consumption than today's CMOS devices, the nanoscaled devices are much less reliable due to manufacturing imperfections (hard errors), and noise and radiation-induced faults (soft errors). Consequently, in addition to timing, area, and power, the reliability has to become a new design criterion. This also means that the topic of reliability has to be incorporated into the circuit design curriculum. In this paper, we propose a course on circuit reliability. We also present in detail, an automated tool for calculation of reliability which could be incorporated into the course as a means for active learning.