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Position: Researcher

Current Institution: Stanford University

 

Abstract:
Traditional solutions for test and reliability do not scale well for modern designs with their size and complexity increasing with every technology generation. Therefore, in order to meet time-to-market requirements as well as acceptable product quality, it is imperative that new methodologies be developed for quickly evaluating a system in the presence of faults.

In my research, statistical methods have been employed and implemented to (1) estimate the stuck-at fault coverage of a test sequence and evaluate the given test vector set without the need for complete fault simulation, and (2) analyze design vulnerabilities in the presence of radiation-based (soft) errors. Experimental results show that these statistical techniques can evaluate a system under test orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods with a small margin of error.

In my dissertation, I have introduced novel methodologies that utilize the information from fault-free simulation and partial fault simulation to predict the fault coverage of a long sequence of test vectors for a design under test. These methodologies are practical for functional testing of complex designs under a long sequence of test vectors. Industry is currently seeking efficient solutions for this challenging problem.

I have also developed a statistical methodology for a detailed vulnerability analysis of systems under soft errors. This methodology works orders of magnitude faster than traditional fault injection. In addition, it is shown that the vulnerability factors calculated by this method are closer to complete fault injection (which is the ideal way of soft error vulnerability analysis), compared to statistical fault injection. Performing such a fast soft error vulnerability analysis is very crucial for companies that design and build safety-critical systems.

Bio:
I got my B.Sc. (Computer engineering) from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and M.Sc. from University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran in 1998, and 2002, respectively. I joined CAD research group, under supervision of Prof. Zain Navabi, before graduating from Masters degree in 2001 and started developing test tools in there. I joined Prof. Jacob Abraham’s research group at University of Texas at Austin in 2009 and graduated in 2014. My research was mainly on scalable techniques for functional fault grading and reliability evaluation of large systems. In Feb. 2015, I joined Prof. Subhasish Mitra’s group at Stanford University as a Postdoctoral fellow and continued my research on reliable systems (soft errors and transistor aging). Currently, I’m a researcher at Stanford University, continuing the research I started as a postdoc and also working as principal product engineer in BigStream Solutions which is an early-stage startup on accelerating big data applications. My main task at BigStream is to develop the back-end infrastructure (bridge between the accelerator hardware and software/application).