One Person's Trash is another Person's Treasure

Melvin Breuer
USC

Monday, February 4, 2008 at 1:00PM

54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: Computing has entered into a period of enormous change. After over 50 years of using reliable components, we are entering an era where silicon fabrics experience high defect rates and significant changes in performance due to process variations, and new computational fabrics are emerging, such as molecular and biological switches, that do not follow the laws of Boolean algebra. In addition, new computing paradigms are being developed, such as probabilistic computing, quantum computing and approximate computing. Finally, a large and exponentially growing domain of multi-media computational tasks exist where all results need not be exactly right. We have combined these three dimensions of revolution into the area of error-tolerance, i.e., where defective components that create some erroneous responses are found to be useful because they produce acceptable results to the end user. In this talk we will briefly survey this area, and touch on such subjects as applications, yield, how bad is a defective chip, and test techniques to quantify erroneous behavior.

Biography: Melvin A. Breuer received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He was Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems from 1991-1994, and again from 2000-2003. He was Chair of the Faculty of the School of Engineering, USC, for the 1997-98 academic year. His main interests are in the area of computer-aided design of digital systems, design-for-test and built-in self-test, and VLSI circuits. Dr. Breuer is the editor and co-author of Design Automation of Digital Systems: Theory and Techniques, Prentice-Hall; editor of Digital Systems Design Automation: Languages, Simulation and Data Base, Computer Science Press; co-author of Diagnosis and Reliable Design of Digital Systems, Computer Science Press; co-editor of Computer Hardware Description Languages and their Applications, North-Holland; co-editor and contributor to Knowledge Based Systems for Test and Diagnosis, North-Holland; and co-author of Digital System Testing and Testable Design, Computer Science Press 1990 and reprinted in 1995 by the IEEE Press. He has published over 230 technical papers and was formerly the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Design Automation and Fault Tolerant Computing, on the editorial board of the Journal of Electronic Testing, the co-editor of the Journal of Digital Systems, and the Program Chairman of the Fifth International IFIP Conference on Computer Hardware Description Languages and Their Applications. He is a co-author of a paper that received an honorable mention award at the 1997 International Test Conference, a co-author of a paper nominated for the best paper award at the 1998 Design Automation and Test in Europe Conf., a co-author of a paper published in the 1998 International Test Conference that was selected to be in a compendium of significant papers over the last 35 years, and a co-author of the best paper at the 2000 Asian Test Symposium. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE; was a Fulbright-Hays scholar (1972); received the 1991 Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship from the University of Southern California, the 1991 USC School of Engineering Award for Exceptional Service, the IEEE Computer Societys 1993 Taylor L. Booth Education Award, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in support of research to Increase the effective yield of VLSI chips via design and test (2003), and the first (2000) Engineering Faculty Council Award for Outstanding Meritorious Service to the USC School of Engineering. He was the keynote speaker at the Fourth Multimedia Technology and Applications Symposium, 1999; the Ninth Asian Test Symposium, 2000; the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), 2004; at the Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), 2005; and an invited speaker at the Thirteenth Asian Test Symposium, 2004. The Test Technology Technical Council of the IEEE Computer Society hosted a forum on October 26, 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Santa Clara, California to celebrate Professor Melvin A. Breuers illustrious career and recognize his contributions to VLSI areas of design automation, design for testability, fault tolerance and test; and the influence he had on the industry and academia as an educator and a mentor. Mel received his B.S. and M.S. from UCLA in 1959 and 1961, respectively, and is best known for having studied under Gerry Estrin when writing his M.S. thesis.