Uncertainty-Aware Compositional System-Level Reliability Analysis

Abstract

Continuous technology scaling has increased the susceptibility of today’s electronic devices to manufacturing tolerances and environmental changes. The resulting uncertainty in component reliability can be only approximated or estimated at design time and might propagate to system level. Therefore, uncertainty must be considered to enable the design of robust systems. In this chapter, we propose a methodology for cross-level reliability analysis to tame the ever increasing analysis complexity of contemporary systems under the influence of uncertainties. The presented methodology combines various reliability analysis techniques across different levels of abstraction while providing an explicit modeling of uncertainties. It introduces mechanisms for (a) the composition and decomposition of the system during analysis and (b) converting analysis data between different levels of abstraction through adapters. The developed analysis techniques are integrated in an automatic electronic system-level reliability analysis tool to allow for the evaluation of reliability-increasing techniques and for DSE!. The tool thereby uses meta-heuristic algorithms for optimization and enables the comparison of system implementation candidates with objectives represented by uncertainty distributions.