Sharing external memory resources between strongly isolated domains in high-end security applications

Nowadays, the society strongly depends on computer networks and systems as a means of reliable communication and data storage. In order to maintain absolute security of the networks and thus the society, one would need to separate everything, but this is not feasible. Consequently, sharing of resources is inevitable. There are security products...

Cryogenic Digital CMOS Memories for Quantum Computing

Scalable universal quantum computers require classical control hardware, physically close to the quantum devices at cryogenic temperatures. Such classical controllers need digital memory for various applications, ranging from high-speed queues to high-speed and low-speed lookup tables and working memory. The power consumption of the memories...

DRAM Reliability: Aging Analysis and Reliability Prediction Model

An increasing amount of critical applications use DRAM as main memory in its computing systems. It it therefore extremely important that these memories function correctly during their lifetime in order to prevent catastrophic failures. Already during the design phase, the reliability of the circuit needs to be predicted so that a reasonable...

A VCO Based Highly Digital Temperature Sensor With 0.034°C/mV Supply Sensitivity

A self-referenced VCO-based temperature sensor with reduced supply sensitivity is presented. The proposed sensor converts temperature information to frequency and then into digital bits. A novel sensing technique is proposed in which temperature information is acquired by evaluating the ratio of the output frequencies of two ring oscillators,...

High-Level Power Estimation and Optimization of DRAMs

Embedded systems have become an integral part of our life in the last few years in multifarious ways, be it in mobile phones, portable audio players, smart watches or even cars. Most embedded systems fall under the category of consumer electronics, such as televisions, mobile devices, and wearable electronics. With several players competing in...

Reordering DRAM Requests for Improved Bandwidth Utilization

The performance gap between processors and memory has grown larger and larger in the last years. With the emergence of the multicores this problem is additionally accelerated. Stalling row changes in the DRAM increase this gap even more, because the maximum theoretical bandwidth cannot be reached. The solution that is proposed in this thesis is...

DRAM fault analysis and test generation

Dynamic random access memories (DRAMs) are the most widely used type of memory in the market today, due to their important application as the main memory of the personal computer (PC). These memories are tested by their manufacturers in an ad hoc way, that results in an expensive test process the price of which is ultimately paid by the end...