'Self-Healing' Chips To Result From SRC Teamwork With Government,

Academia 7/25/2006 San Francisco -- Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)

announced the development of chips that refuse to fail. Joint research by SRC, the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Michigan will focus on analysis of the future
landscape of hard silicon failures and their impact on non-trivial designs, such as
microprocessors and their switch components. Success by the collaborative research effort of
government, business and academia may provide the key to the future reliability of smaller
semiconductor designs.

"In this project, we'll go much further than before by designing chips that can diagnose when
components wear out and heal themselves on the fly," said Sankar Basu, program director at
NSF. "The bolstering of scientific underpinnings of computing is extremely important to the NSF.
This issue of ensuring reliability is critical to the future of high-performance computing for even
the most aggressive of applications."

Current industry efforts to make chips more reliable, through redundancy and other traditional
means, involve both higher costs and the sacrifice of the speed that consumers have come to
expect in nearly all electronics, from servers to cell phones to transportation. In comparison,
results from this announcement of collaborative research are projected to provide defect-tolerant
designs that will increase product lifetime through components that take longer to fail. Without
innovative approaches to address in-field silicon failures, product lifetime will become
dangerously short.

"The aim is for chips that won't fail. That will be a first for the industry. The ramifications of
increasing the reliability of the microprocessor in computing applications like planes, trains and
automobiles is something we get very excited about," said William Joyner, SRC's director of
Computer-Aided Design and Test for the Global Research Collaboration (GRC), a unit of the SRC
that is responsible for narrowing the options for carrying CMOS to its ultimate limit. He is an IBM
assignee to the consortium. "To continue the performance pace that billions of people have come
to expect, we need more than technology advances. Sustained performance improvements
require a critical coupling between technology and design."

Benefits of the research will serve chipmakers and end-users in Asia and worldwide for
communications, computing, aeronautics and aerospace applications, medical devices,
automotive and consumer electronics, and a wide range of other applications that are dependent
on silicon's correct performance.

SOURCE: Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)