MIP Plasma Decapsulation of Copper-wired Semiconductor Devices for Failure Analysis

The majority of Integrated Circuit (IC) devices are encapsulated in wire-bonded plastic IC packages. Epoxy molding compound is used as the encapsulation material and gold was used as the bonding wire material. However, the increase of gold material price from 400 USD/ounce in year 2005 to 1400 USD/ounce in year 2013 results in a major cost issue...

Transistor-Level Statistical Timing Analysis: Solving Random Differential Equations Directly

In this Ph.D. thesis, a novel non-MC Random differential Equation based Statistical Timing Analysis (RESTA) method is proposed, which considers both process variations and electrical circuit effects, such as multiple input simultaneous switching and crosstalk effects. To make the approach practical for analysis of large circuits at high accuracy...

Information Propagation in Peer-to-Peer Networking: Modeling and Empirical Studies

Although being a young technology, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has spurred dramatic evolution on the Internet over the recent twenty years. Unlike traditional server-client mode, P2P networking applications are user-centric. Users (peers) generate their own content and share it with others across the Internet. Be it a P2P file-sharing network,...

Two-level preconditioned conjugate gradient methods with applications to bubbly flow problems

The Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) method is one of the most popular iterative methods for solving large linear systems with a symmetric and positive semi-definite coefficient matrix. However, if the preconditioned coefficient matrix is ill-conditioned, the convergence of the PCG method typically deteriorates. Instead, a two-level PCG...

OFDM transmissions over rapidly changing channels

This thesis is dedicated to efficiently estimate and equalize time-varying channels in OFDM and single-carrier systems.