Keynote 2 – Sustainability and the Outlook of Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor industry continues to grow rapidly with the development of AI technology and its deployment in various application domains, broadly covering homes, offices, factories, vehicles, warehouses, all kinds of public sites, green energy fields, etc. A modern semiconductor-power AI system consists of not just the AI computing servers in the cloud, but also the 5G or satellite communication network, and a lot of smart Internet-of-Things devices distributed over a large application field. The sustainability of an AI system is of paramount significance to ensure reliable and long-lasting operations without failures. In this talk, we have discussed various strategies to achieve the sustainability of a multi-die IC used in such ever-increasing mission-critical AI-related applications. The techniques include rigorous testing, online monitoring, and self-healing techniques. These techniques target not just the hard failures but also the parametric defects that cause performance hazards, thereby affecting the reliability and or lifetime of an IC product. In particular, we demonstrate with a few examples how various timing circuits such as the Phase-Locked Loop, the Delay-Locked Loop, and the Time-to-Digital Converter can be used as effective building blocks inside an IC to support built-in speed grading, online health condition checking, and online self-repair to achieve the required sustainability.