The design of manufacturable and dependable systems has received wide attention in the past decades, especially within (safety-) critical scenarios, where the occurrence of a failure could jeopardize missions and/or the health of humans or impact the environment. In particular, several studies have been carried out to tackle the various phases of the design of a system, to guarantee its correctness, through validation and verification methods, as well as to introduce specific properties devoted to the detection and mitigation of the occurrence of faults.
Constant advances in manufacturing yield and field reliability have been important enabling factors for electronic devices pervading our lives, from medical to consumer electronics, from railways to the automotive and avionics scenarios. At the same time, both technology and architectures are today at a turning point; many ideas are being proposed to postpone the end of Moore’s law such as extending CMOS technology as well as finding alternatives to it like CNTFET, QCA, memristors, etc, while at the architectural level, the spin towards higher frequencies and aggressive dynamic instruction scheduling has been replaced by the trend of including many simpler cores on a single die. These paradigm shifts imply new dependability issues and thus require a rethinking of design, manufacturing, testing, and validation of reliable next-generation systems. These manufacturability and dependability issues will be resolved efficiently only if a cross-layer approach that takes into account technology, circuit and architectural aspects is developed.
The ne
w European COST Action MEDIAN (Manufacturable and Dependable Multicore Architectures at Nanoscale), with current representations from organisations in 17 countries, has been established to bring together a large network of European scientists with expertise on the reliability and dependability aspects of future digital systems development. The objectives of the network are to explore both the development and application domains of the field and promote a strong interaction between these domains, as well as to encourage collaboration between industry, academia and research organizations.
COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology. The emphasis is on the creation of specialists networks for collaboration between European and other scientists to address specific research challenges. The emphasis is on enabling break-through scientific developments leading to new concepts and products and ultimately helping to strengthen Europe’s research and innovation capacities. The KIOS Research Center is one of two partners from organisations in Cyprus participating in the MEDIAN COST Action. KIOS faculty member Dr. Maria Michael is part of the Action’s Management Committee and Vice-Chair of one of the technical Working Groups.
For further information please refer to the project website: www.median-project.eu/
