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Semiconductor innovation drives improvements to technologies that are critical to modern society. The country that successfully accelerates semiconductor innovation is positioned to lead future semiconductor-driven industries and benefit from the resulting economic growth. It is our view that a next generation infrastructure is necessary to accelerate and enhance semiconductor innovation in the U.S. In this paper, we propose such an advanced infrastructure composed of a national network of facilities with enhancements in technology and business models. These enhancements enable application-driven and challenge-based research and development, and ensure that facilities are accessible and sustainable. The main tenets are: a challenge-driven operational model, a next-generation infrastructure to serve that operational model, technology innovations needed for advanced facilities to speed up learning cycles, and innovative cost-effective business models for sustainability. Ultimately, the expected outcomes of such a participatory, scalable, and sustainable nation-level advanced infrastructure will have tremendous impact on government, industry, and academia alike.

Hardware accelerators (HAs) are essential building blocks for fast and energy-efficient computing systems. Accelerator Quick Error Detection (A-QED) is a recent formal technique which uses Bounded Model Checking for pre-silicon verification of HAs. A-QED checks an HA for self-consistency, i.e., whether identical inputs within a sequence of operations always produce the same output. Under modest assumptions, A-QED is both sound and complete. However, as is well-known, large design sizes significantly limit the scalability of formal verification, including A-QED. We overcome this scalability challenge through a new decomposition technique for A-QED, called A-QED with Decomposition (A-QED$^2$). A-QED$^2$ systematically decomposes an HA into smaller, functional sub-modules, called sub-accelerators, which are then verified independently using A-QED. We prove completeness of A-QED$^2$; in particular, if the full HA under verification contains a bug, then A-QED$^2$ ensures detection of that bug during A-QED verification of the corresponding sub-accelerators. Results on over 100 (buggy) versions of a wide variety of HAs with millions of logic gates demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of A-QED$^2$., Comment: preprint of a paper to appear at FMCAD 2021, including appendix

Hardware (HW) security issues have been emerging at an alarming rate in recent years. Transient execution attacks, in particular, pose a genuine threat to the security of modern computing systems. Despite recent advances, understanding the intricate implications of microarchitectural design decisions on processor security remains a great challenge and has caused a number of update cycles in the past. number of update cycles in the past. This papers addresses the need for a new approach to HW sign-off verification which guarantees the security of processors at the Register Transfer Level (RTL). To this end, we introduce a formal definition of security with respect to transient execution attacks, formulated as a HW property. We present a formal proof methodology based on Unique Program Execution Checking (UPEC) which can be used to systematically detect all vulnerabilities to transient execution attacks in RTL designs. UPEC does not exploit any a priori knowledge on known attacks and can therefore detect also vulnerabilities based on new, so far unknown, types of channels. This is demonstrated by two new attack scenarios discovered in our experiments with UPEC. UPEC scales to a wide range of HW designs, including in-order processors (RocketChip), pipelines with out-of-order writeback (Ariane), and processors with deep out-of-order speculative execution (BOOM). To the best of our knowledge, UPEC is the first RTL verification technique that exhaustively covers transient execution side channels in processors of realistic complexity.

We present a novel approach to pre-silicon verification of processor designs. The purpose of pre-silicon verification is to find logic bugs in a design at an early stage and thus avoid time- and cost-intensive post-silicon debugging. Our approach relies on symbolic quick error detection (Symbolic QED, or SQED). SQED is targeted at finding logic bugs in a symbolic representation of a design by combining bounded model checking (BMC) with QED tests. QED tests are powerful in generating short sequences of instructions (traces) that trigger bugs. We extend an existing SQED approach with symbolic starting states. This way, we enable the BMC tool to select starting states arbitrarily when generating a trace. To avoid false positives, (e.g., traces starting in unreachable states that may not be-have in accordance with the processor instruction-set architecture), we define constraints to restrict the set of possible starting states. We demonstrate that these constraints, togeth-er with reasonable assumptions about the system behavior, allow us to avoid false positives. Using our approach, we discovered previously unknown bugs in open-source RISC-V processor cores that existing methods cannot detect. Moreover, our novel approach out-performs existing ones in the detection of bugs having long traces and in the detection of hardware Trojans, i.e., unauthorized modifications of a design., Comment: This article has the full author list which was missing in arXiv:1908.06757. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.06757

Symbolic quick error detection (SQED) is a formal pre-silicon verification technique targeted at processor designs. It leverages bounded model checking (BMC) to check a design for counterexamples to a self-consistency property: given the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the design, executing an instruction sequence twice on the same inputs must always produce the same outputs. Self-consistency is a universal, implementation-independent property. Consequently, in contrast to traditional verification approaches that use implementation-specific assertions (often generated manually), SQED does not require a full formal design specification or manually-written properties. Case studies have shown that SQED is effective for commercial designs and that SQED substantially improves design productivity. However, until now there has been no formal characterization of its bug-finding capabilities. We aim to close this gap by laying a formal foundation for SQED. We use a transition-system processor model and define the notion of a bug using an abstract specification relation. We prove the soundness of SQED, i.e., that any bug reported by SQED is in fact a real bug in the processor. Importantly, this result holds regardless of what the actual specification relation is. We next describe conditions under which SQED is complete, that is, what kinds of bugs it is guaranteed to find. We show that for a large class of bugs, SQED can always find a trace exhibiting the bug. Ultimately, we prove full completeness of a variant of SQED that uses specialized state reset instructions. Our results enable a rigorous understanding of SQED and its bug-finding capabilities and give insights on how to optimize implementations of SQED in practice., Comment: preprint of a paper to appear at FMCAD 2020, including appendix

We present an industrial case study that demonstrates the practicality and effectiveness of Symbolic Quick Error Detection (Symbolic QED) in detecting logic design flaws (logic bugs) during pre-silicon verification. Our study focuses on several microcontroller core designs (~1,800 flip-flops, ~70,000 logic gates) that have been extensively verified using an industrial verification flow and used for various commercial automotive products. The results of our study are as follows: 1. Symbolic QED detected all logic bugs in the designs that were detected by the industrial verification flow (which includes various flavors of simulation-based verification and formal verification). 2. Symbolic QED detected additional logic bugs that were not recorded as detected by the industrial verification flow. (These additional bugs were also perhaps detected by the industrial verification flow.) 3. Symbolic QED enables significant design productivity improvements: (a) 8X improved (i.e., reduced) verification effort for a new design (8 person-weeks for Symbolic QED vs. 17 person-months using the industrial verification flow). (b) 60X improved verification effort for subsequent designs (2 person-days for Symbolic QED vs. 4-7 person-months using the industrial verification flow). (c) Quick bug detection (runtime of 20 seconds or less), together with short counterexamples (10 or fewer instructions) for quick debug, using Symbolic QED.

Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels" that reveal secret data without any explicit information flow between the secret and the attacker. Many sources believe that such covert channels are intrinsic to highly advanced processor architectures based on speculation and out-of-order execution, suggesting that such security risks can be avoided by staying away from high-end processors. This paper, however, shows that the problem is of wider scope: we present new classes of covert channel attacks which are possible in average-complexity processors with in-order pipelining, as they are mainstream in applications ranging from Internet-of-Things to Autonomous Systems. We present a new approach as a foundation for remedy against covert channels: while all previous attacks were found by clever thinking of human attackers, this paper presents an automated and exhaustive method called "Unique Program Execution Checking" which detects and locates vulnerabilities to covert channels systematically, including those to covert channels unknown so far.

One viable solution for continuous reduction in energy-per-operation is to rethink functionality to cope with uncertainty by adopting computational approaches that are inherently robust to uncertainty. It requires a novel look at data representations, associated operations, and circuits, and at materials and substrates that enable them. 3D integrated nanotechnologies combined with novel brain-inspired computational paradigms that support fast learning and fault tolerance could lead the way. Recognizing the very size of the brain's circuits, hyperdimensional (HD) computing can model neural activity patterns with points in a HD space, that is, with hypervectors as large randomly generated patterns. At its very core, HD computing is about manipulating and comparing these patterns inside memory. Emerging nanotechnologies such as carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNFETs) and resistive RAM (RRAM), and their monolithic 3D integration offer opportunities for hardware implementations of HD computing through tight integration of logic and memory, energy-efficient computation, and unique device characteristics. We experimentally demonstrate and characterize an end-to-end HD computing nanosystem built using monolithic 3D integration of CNFETs and RRAM. With our nanosystem, we experimentally demonstrate classification of 21 languages with measured accuracy of up to 98% on >20,000 sentences (6.4 million characters), training using one text sample (~100,000 characters) per language, and resilient operation (98% accuracy) despite 78% hardware errors in HD representation (outputs stuck at 0 or 1). By exploiting the unique properties of the underlying nanotechnologies, we show that HD computing, when implemented with monolithic 3D integration, can be up to 420X more energy-efficient while using 25X less area compared to traditional silicon CMOS implementations., Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures

We present Symbolic Quick Error Detection (Symbolic QED), a structured approach for logic bug detection and localization which can be used both during pre-silicon design verification as well as post-silicon validation and debug. This new methodology leverages prior work on Quick Error Detection (QED) which has been demonstrated to drastically reduce the latency, in terms of the number of clock cycles, of error detection following the activation of a logic (or electrical) bug. QED works through software transformations, including redundant execution and control flow checking, of the applied tests. Symbolic QED combines these error-detecting QED transformations with bounded model checking-based formal analysis to generate minimal-length bug activation traces that detect and localize any logic bugs in the design. We demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of Symbolic QED using the OpenSPARC T2, a 500-million-transistor open-source multicore System-on-Chip (SoC) design, and using "difficult" logic bug scenarios observed in various state-of-the-art commercial multicore SoCs. Our results show that Symbolic QED: (i) is fully automatic, unlike manual techniques in use today that can be extremely time-consuming and expensive; (ii) requires only a few hours in contrast to manual approaches that might take days (or even months) or formal techniques that often take days or fail completely for large designs; and (iii) generates counter-examples (for activating and detecting logic bugs) that are up to 6 orders of magnitude shorter than those produced by traditional techniques. Significantly, this new approach does not require any additional hardware.

We present CLEAR (Cross-Layer Exploration for Architecting Resilience), a first of its kind framework which overcomes a major challenge in the design of digital systems that are resilient to reliability failures: achieve desired resilience targets at minimal costs (energy, power, execution time, area) by combining resilience techniques across various layers of the system stack (circuit, logic, architecture, software, algorithm). This is also referred to as cross-layer resilience. In this paper, we focus on radiation-induced soft errors in processor cores. We address both single-event upsets (SEUs) and single-event multiple upsets (SEMUs) in terrestrial environments. Our framework automatically and systematically explores the large space of comprehensive resilience techniques and their combinations across various layers of the system stack (586 cross-layer combinations in this paper), derives cost-effective solutions that achieve resilience targets at minimal costs, and provides guidelines for the design of new resilience techniques. Our results demonstrate that a carefully optimized combination of circuit-level hardening, logic-level parity checking, and micro-architectural recovery provides a highly cost-effective soft error resilience solution for general-purpose processor cores. For example, a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate is achieved at only 2.1% energy cost for an out-of-order core (6.1% for an in-order core) with no speed impact. However, (application-aware) selective circuit-level hardening alone, guided by a thorough analysis of the effects of soft errors on application benchmarks, provides a cost-effective soft error resilience solution as well (with ~1% additional energy cost for a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate)., Comment: Unedited version of paper published in Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems

During post-silicon validation, manufactured integrated circuits are extensively tested in actual system environments to detect design bugs. Bug localization involves identification of a bug trace (a sequence of inputs that activates and detects the bug) and a hardware design block where the bug is located. Existing bug localization practices during post-silicon validation are mostly manual and ad hoc, and, hence, extremely expensive and time consuming. This is particularly true for subtle electrical bugs caused by unexpected interactions between a design and its electrical state. We present E-QED, a new approach that automatically localizes electrical bugs during post-silicon validation. Our results on the OpenSPARC T2, an open-source 500-million-transistor multicore chip design, demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of E-QED: starting with a failed post-silicon test, in a few hours (9 hours on average) we can automatically narrow the location of the bug to (the fan-in logic cone of) a handful of candidate flip-flops (18 flip-flops on average for a design with ~ 1 Million flip-flops) and also obtain the corresponding bug trace. The area impact of E-QED is ~2.5%. In contrast, deter-mining this same information might take weeks (or even months) of mostly manual work using traditional approaches.

We present a first of its kind framework which overcomes a major challenge in the design of digital systems that are resilient to reliability failures: achieve desired resilience targets at minimal costs (energy, power, execution time, area) by combining resilience techniques across various layers of the system stack (circuit, logic, architecture, software, algorithm). This is also referred to as cross-layer resilience. In this paper, we focus on radiation-induced soft errors in processor cores. We address both single-event upsets (SEUs) and single-event multiple upsets (SEMUs) in terrestrial environments. Our framework automatically and systematically explores the large space of comprehensive resilience techniques and their combinations across various layers of the system stack (586 cross-layer combinations in this paper), derives cost-effective solutions that achieve resilience targets at minimal costs, and provides guidelines for the design of new resilience techniques. We demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our framework using two diverse designs: a simple, in-order processor core and a complex, out-of-order processor core. Our results demonstrate that a carefully optimized combination of circuit-level hardening, logic-level parity checking, and micro-architectural recovery provides a highly cost-effective soft error resilience solution for general-purpose processor cores. For example, a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate is achieved at only 2.1% energy cost for an out-of-order core (6.1% for an in-order core) with no speed impact. However, selective circuit-level hardening alone, guided by a thorough analysis of the effects of soft errors on application benchmarks, provides a cost-effective soft error resilience solution as well (with ~1% additional energy cost for a 50x improvement in silent data corruption rate)., Comment: Extended version of paper published in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Design Automation Conference

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) are promising candidates for building energy-efficient digital systems at highly-scaled technology nodes. However, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are inherently subject to variations that reduce circuit yield, increase susceptibility to noise, and severely degrade their anticipated energy and speed benefits. Joint exploration and optimization of CNT processing options and CNFET circuit design are required to overcome this outstanding challenge. Unfortunately, existing approaches for such exploration and optimization are computationally expensive, and mostly rely on trial-and-error-based ad hoc techniques. In this paper, we present a framework that quickly evaluates the impact of CNT variations on circuit delay and noise margin, and systematically explores the large space of CNT processing options to derive optimized CNT processing and CNFET circuit design guidelines. We demonstrate that our framework: 1) runs over 100x faster than existing approaches, and 2) accurately identifies the most important CNT processing parameters, together with CNFET circuit design parameters (e.g., for CNFET sizing and standard cell layouts), to minimize the impact of CNT variations on CNFET circuit speed with less than 5% energy cost, while simultaneously meeting circuit-level noise margin and yield constraints.

There are increasing concerns about possible malicious modifications of integrated circuits (ICs) used in critical applications. Such attacks are often referred to as hardware Trojans. While many techniques focus on hardware Trojan detection during IC testing, it is still possible for attacks to go undetected. Using a combination of new design techniques and new memory technologies, we present a new approach that detects a wide variety of hardware Trojans during IC testing and also during system operation in the field. Our approach can also prevent a wide variety of attacks during synthesis, place-and-route, and fabrication of ICs. It can be applied to any digital system, and can be tuned for both traditional and split-manufacturing methods. We demonstrate its applicability for both ASICs and FPGAs. Using fabricated test chips with Trojan emulation capabilities and also using simulations, we demonstrate: 1. The area and power costs of our approach can range between 7.4-165% and 0.07-60%, respectively, depending on the design and the attacks targeted; 2. The speed impact can be minimal (close to 0%); 3. Our approach can detect 99.998% of Trojans (emulated using test chips) that do not require detailed knowledge of the design being attacked; 4. Our approach can prevent 99.98% of specific attacks (simulated) that utilize detailed knowledge of the design being attacked (e.g., through reverse-engineering). 5. Our approach never produces any false positives, i.e., it does not report attacks when the IC operates correctly., Comment: 17 pages, 23 figures. Extended version of paper to appear in IEEE Trans. on CAD

The effects of soft errors in processor cores have been widely studied. However, little has been published about soft errors in uncore components, such as memory subsystem and I/O controllers, of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC). In this work, we study how soft errors in uncore components affect system-level behaviors. We have created a new mixed-mode simulation platform that combines simulators at two different levels of abstraction, and achieves 20,000x speedup over RTL-only simulation. Using this platform, we present the first study of the system-level impact of soft errors inside various uncore components of a large-scale, multi-core SoC using the industrial-grade, open-source OpenSPARC T2 SoC design. Our results show that soft errors in uncore components can significantly impact system-level reliability. We also demonstrate that uncore soft errors can create major challenges for traditional system-level checkpoint recovery techniques. To overcome such recovery challenges, we present a new replay recovery technique for uncore components belonging to the memory subsystem. For the L2 cache controller and the DRAM controller components of OpenSPARC T2, our new technique reduces the probability that an application run fails to produce correct results due to soft errors by more than 100x with 3.32% and 6.09% chip-level area and power impact, respectively., Comment: to be published in Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference