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Speakers: David Greenhill (Cerebras)
David Greenhill has over 30 years’ experience designing high-performance computing systems. Currently he is VP of silicon engineering at Cerebras Systems Inc. His team develops all aspects of the wafer scale engine from architecture through to productization and test. Previously he has worked on the Inmos Transputer, Sun Microsystems server CPUs, Texas Instruments OMAP processors and Altera/Intel FPGAs.
Abstract: The rapid growth of generative AI is reshaping the requirements for semiconductor systems. Trillion parameter large language models, AI reasoning, and Agentic AI push the need for very fast inference. The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) demonstrates a radically different approach: treating an entire silicon wafer as a single 46,225 mm2 chip, integrating 4 trillion transistors and almost a million AI-optimized cores into one tightly coupled compute fabric.
| 10:30 | IEA-Connect: One Engineer's Solution Becomes Another Engineer's Context PRESENTER: Seoyeon Kim ABSTRACT. Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming semiconductor test-data analytics by enabling AI agents to generate code, analyze tables, and perform complex reasoning. This paper presents IEA-Connect, a context-centric architecture that enables engineering knowledge to accumulate and propagate through everyday analytics work. The central idea is that every validated solution becomes reusable context for future solutions. Artifacts produced during analytics, including prompts, workflows, scripts, templates, and analytic-ready tables (ARTs), are automatically captured and organized as reusable knowledge assets. Engineers and AI agents can retrieve, adapt, and build upon these assets, creating a connected ecosystem in which one engineer's solution becomes another engineer's starting point. The paper introduces the principles underlying IEA-Connect, including ART-centered context representation, workflow-grounded knowledge capture, context inheritance, and orchestration mechanisms for collective engineering intelligence. By treating context as the primary unit of reuse, IEA-Connect transforms isolated analytics activities into a continuously evolving engineering knowledge network. A live demo will be presented. |
| 11:00 | An Interpretable, Production-Scale Machine-Learning Framework for Early CPU Performance Binning at the CP Stage PRESENTER: Chi-Hsing Hsu ABSTRACT. Advanced-node CPU manufacturing suffers a 1–3 month chip-probe (CP) to final-test (FT) latency, causing high-performance chip yield loss. We deploy an interpretable, production-scale machine learning framework that predicts FT binning directly from CP-stage parameters (>5,000 features reduced to 200 via two-stage selection) at HVM scale (10⁴–10⁶ chips/week). For binary classification, the model achieves F1 = 0.882 and AUC-PR = 0.938, a 60.8% AUC-PR gain over the industrial single-indicator baseline (0.583). Group-specific SHAP profiling identifies distinct physical drivers per market segment. Early CP-stage deployment shortens the yield feedback loop from months to days, saving ~$5M per CPU product generation. |
| 11:30 | Beyond Monte Carlo: Improved Wafer Acceptance Test (WAT) Limit Setting via Correlation-Aware Synthetic Data Generation PRESENTER: Matthew Nigh ABSTRACT. We compare two approaches for generating additional Process Control Monitor (PCM) data: Monte Carlo simulation and synthetic data generation. PCMs are electrical test structures placed in wafer scribe lines to monitor manufacturing variation, assess wafer health, and inform specification limits. During process ramp-up, limited measurements necessitate additional data. Traditional Monte Carlo methods rely on random sampling, lacking spatial awareness and producing unrealistic outcomes. Using measurements from manufactured wafers, we show that synthetic data generation better represents real variation. μ±4σ limits derived from synthetic data contain 98.7% of real wafers versus 10.3% for Monte Carlo on a GlobalFoundries 12LP FinFET process. |
| 10:30 | A Methodology for AI-based Defect Detection and Localization for 3D Chiplet Interconnects PRESENTER: Adam Cron ABSTRACT. Chiplet-based 2.5-D and 3-D multi-die packages increasingly feature tens of thousands of die-to-die micro-bump interconnects susceptible to hard opens, hard shorts, resistive weak opens, resistive weak shorts, and inter-bump coupling faults. Existing approaches of automatic test pattern generation rely on simplified electrical models with no hardware corroboration, employ NP-hard heuristics that become computationally infeasible at package scale, and do not address multi-defect scenarios, quantitative ground bounce bounds, or fine-pitch scaling behavior. This paper presents an electrically parameterized Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework for micro-bump interconnect test pattern generation, corresponding to a range of different topologies. |
| 11:00 | DT-MATCH: Defect- and Topology-Aware Chiplet Matching for Yield Optimization in Heterogeneous Integration PRESENTER: Xuanyi Tan ABSTRACT. Heterogeneous integration enables chiplet-based system-on-chip (SoC) design but introduces yield challenges due to manufacturing defects and complex die-to-die (D2D) interconnect constraints. Lane-level defects, limited spares, and structural compatibility restrict feasible chiplet combinations. This paper proposes a defect- and interconnect-aware chiplet matching framework to maximize functional SoC yield. The approach models defect maps, spare budgets, and topology constraints, while leveraging chiplet rotation and interface permutation to expand matching options. A compatibility matrix is constructed, and the global assembly problem is formulated as an integer linear program. Experimental results demonstrate significant yield improvement over baseline matching strategies. |
| 11:30 | Parallelized Instrument Access via High-Bandwidth IJTAG for Efficient HBM Testing PRESENTER: Sai Varun Puligilla ABSTRACT. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is essential for 2.5D and 3D systems, providing the massive data throughput required for high performance computing and AI. HBM’s wide interfaces, stacked die structure, and extensive DFT needs significantly increase test time. Traditional IJTAG architectures rely on long scan chains and serialized instrument access, creating bottlenecks. This paper demonstrates how High Bandwidth IJTAG delivers a scalable, and parallel test access mechanism for 3D ICs with HBM. Its packet-based protocol and high throughput paths streamline scheduling across logic and memory dies, reducing test time and improving verification efficiency, as confirmed by experimental and simulation results. |
Talk Title: Safe by Design in the Era of AI & AV
by Jyotika Athavale
Abstract: The compute demands of next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators are driving unprecedented silicon integration. This pushes ASIC architectures to complexity levels previously unseen in mission-critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles (AV). Ensuring functional safety and hardware dependability at this scale is a formidable challenge; traditional, localized methodologies for safety analysis, fault injection, and FMEDA can no longer keep pace with heterogeneous, multi-billion transistor designs. Today, the industry is hitting a "complexity wall," exacerbated by fragmented data formats across disparate EDA toolchains and IP blocks.
This talk explains how the high-performance silicon ecosystem can scale functional safety and dependability through standardized interoperability and advanced on-chip safety mechanisms. We will explore the critical features for building verifiably robust silicon, including In-System Test (IST) for periodic health checks, Software Diagnostic Libraries (SDL) to augment hardware self-testing, and comprehensive Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) to monitor device behavior from manufacturing to end-of-life. Ultimately, coupling these mechanisms with a unified data exchange format is essential to detect faults, mitigate risks, and demonstrate safety intent.
Panel and Q/A: Organized by Yervant Zorian
| 10:30 | Hardware Root of Trust for SSN-based Designs with High-Bandwidth IJTAG PRESENTER: Ujjwal Guin ABSTRACT. This work presents a novel hardware root of trust to counter hardware security threats and prevent leakage of secret information or other sensitive assets across the various stages of IC testing. It builds on and easily integrates with a Streaming Scan Network technology – a new packetized test data delivery system whose high-speed parallel bus is also deployed to drive the serial IJTAG network. The proposed root of trust comprises optimized security primitives. Their presence stems from an adopted challenge-response authentication protocol that enables multi-level access protection and thus fine-grained control over the accessibility of individual cores and test instruments. |
| 11:00 | Towards Single-Trace AES Key Recovery Using Random Forest Classifiers Based on Key Values PRESENTER: Mottaqiallah Taouil ABSTRACT. Widely used side-channel attacks such as Correlation Power Analysis and Template Power Attacks often detect leakage without reliably achieving full key recovery. This paper proposes a Random Forest (RndF)-based power side-channel attack methodology for AES using three leakage models: Hamming Weight of the S-box output, S-box output value, and key value. The method is evaluated on three unprotected and five protected public AES datasets. Results show substantial trace reduction compared with state-of-the-art attacks, with near single-trace recovery in several scenarios and strong performance across multiple protected implementations. These findings provide an effective framework for evaluating security and guiding stronger countermeasures. |
| 11:30 | THETA: Topology-Aware Secure Boot in Heterogeneous Integration for Trust and Assurance PRESENTER: Arjun Hati ABSTRACT. Heterogeneous integration (HI) enables composition of chiplets across technology nodes but introduces new security risks: even trusted dies can form insecure systems if interconnections are manipulated. Existing mechanisms verify chiplet identity but not system topology, leaving HI vulnerable to connectivity-based tampering. We present THETA, a topology-aware secure boot framework that reconstructs the runtime chiplet connectivity graph and authenticates it against a golden reference. THETA further enforces connectivity policies, including required and forbidden adjacencies and multi-hop constraints, to detect unauthorized links and bypass attacks. Evaluation shows THETA achieves this with low overhead, incurring less than 6% area and sub-33 µs latency. |
| 13:30 | DICE: A Digital Twin-Driven In-Field Continuous-Test Engine for Silicon Lifecycle Management PRESENTER: Hsiao-Ping Ni ABSTRACT. Silicon lifecycle management (SLM) requires in-field testing under workloads. We present DICE, a Digital Twin-Driven In-Field Continuous-Test Engine that uses operating-system telemetry and power, temperature, frequency, and profiler signals instead of privileged hardware counters. DICE learns nominal behavior from known-good traces and detects anomalies from prediction residuals using conformal calibration. On MacBook Pro traces, DICE achieves 0.8375 and 0.9536 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and precision-recall (PR) metrics, respectively. For workloads excluded from training, it provides mean and worst-case PR values of 0.8742 and 0.8100, respectively. These results highlight DICE’s in-field detection capability under limited observability. |
| 14:00 | A Software-Based methodology for In-Field Power-on Self-Test of Safety-Critical Timer Modules PRESENTER: Nicola di Gruttola Giardino ABSTRACT. This work proposes a set of time and memory bounded Software-Based methodologies for power-on Self test (or key-on self test) of timer modules for safety critical domains, such as automotive and aerospace. Fault simulations campaigns are conducted on an industrial device and intersected with Logic BIST at key-on fault coverages for Stuck-At and Transition Delay fault models. In order to show the portability of the proposed methodology to a smaller technology node, experimental results are presented on Stuck-At and Transition Delay fault models for an open source System-on-Chip. |
| 14:30 | VITAL: Voltage-Frequency Driven Safety and Aging Analysis for Silicon Lifecycle Management PRESENTER: Eduardo Ortega ABSTRACT. The rise of safety- and mission-critical hardware has increased demand for efficient in-silicon analytics to ensure long-term reliability. Silicon lifecycle management (SLM) enables monitoring of path-delay variability due to voltage, temperature, and aging, but existing approaches incur high overhead and rely on scarce labeled data. We present VITAL: Voltage-Frequency Driven Safety and Aging Analysis for Silicon Lifecycle Management, a lightweight framework for chip-wide delay estimation using existing telemetry such as performance counters and sensors. VITAL constructs VF-driven safety counters to track timing margins and aging effects, enabling accurate, lifecycle-aware monitoring with minimal overhead for improved in-field reliability. |
| 13:30 | E-ATPG: Testability-Aware E-graph Rewriting for Automatic Test Pattern Generation PRESENTER: Zhiteng Chao ABSTRACT. Automated Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) plays a crucial role in the post-silicon validation and manufacturing test flow. It has a decisive influence on the final test quality of integrated circuits. Traditional testability enhancement methods rely on localized circuit modifications that fail to systematically explore the global design space, often missing the optimal structure for conflict reduction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes E-ATPG, a novel framework that leverages E-graphs to perform testability-driven logic restructuring. Experimental results over a range of benchmarks demonstrate that E-ATPG significantly reshapes the circuit's search space to be "ATPG-friendly". |
| 14:00 | DEFT: Differentiable Automatic Test Pattern Generation PRESENTER: Wei Li ABSTRACT. Modern IC complexity drives test pattern growth, with the majority of patterns targeting a small set of hard-to-detect (HTD) faults. This motivates new ATPG algorithms to improve test effectiveness specifically for HTD faults. This paper presents DEFT, a new ATPG approach that reformulates the discrete ATPG problem as a continuous optimization task. DEFT introduces a mathematically grounded reparameterization that aligns the expected continuous objective with discrete fault-detection semantics, enabling reliable gradient-based pattern generation. To ensure scalability and stability on deep circuit graphs, DEFT integrates a custom CUDA kernel for efficient forward-backward propagation and applies gradient normalization to mitigate vanishing gradients. |
| 14:30 | Accelerated DFT Optimization Using Compression-aware ATPG Emulation PRESENTER: Zhiwei Liao ABSTRACT. As modern multi core systems-on-chip grow in complexity, selecting optimal test compression configurations—such as chain count and PRPG size—is critical for minimizing test cost. This work presents an efficient approach that uses virtual compression–aware Automatic Test Pattern Generation emulation to rapidly estimate test cost for different compression architectures, eliminating the need for repeated physical compressor insertion during Design for Test exploration. Integrated with an AI guided distributed optimization framework, the solution automates and accelerates the selection and evaluation of candidate compressor configurations, enabling rapid identification of compression architectures that deliver optimal quality of results while significantly reducing turnaround time. |
(Sandeep: Need for standards)
Tentative Agenda:
4:00-6:30pm
4:00-4:15pm - Opening remark
4:15-5:15pm - Keynote by Michael Campbell, Sr VP of Qualcomm, Inc.
Title: AI: A Hero's (Test's) Journey
Artificial intelligence is redefining the landscape of semiconductor engineering, creating new opportunities to address increasing device complexity, accelerating product cycles, and unprecedented growth in engineering data. This session explores the evolving role of technology, analytics, and intelligent systems in modern test and product engineering, highlighting how organizations are adapting to meet the demands of next-generation silicon development. Attendees will gain insights into emerging industry trends, practical applications, and the changing relationship between engineers, data, and advanced computational tools. Through a combination of real-world examples and industry perspectives, the presentation examines how innovation is reshaping engineering workflows, improving operational efficiency, and enabling teams to tackle increasingly complex challenges.
Michael Campbell is Senior Vice President of Engineering for QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies, (QCT), where he leads Product and Test Engineering, Test Automation, Failure Analysis, and Yield.
Michael joined Qualcomm in 1996. At Qualcomm, Michael has led teams across multiple areas of the business including Design Automation, FA, Yield Optimization, Product Development & Test Engineering (PDTE), Foundry Semiconductor Analysis, and Quality. Since 2014 he has been driving ML & AI test optimization internally & externally with key ATE/EDA providers for value-add AI in the test world. His drive has enabled AI boxes at multiple tester companies that enable in line real time AI functions to drive and deliver improvements in test quality and cost.
During his career at Qualcomm, Michael also has brought up Design and Test facilities in Bangalore, Singapore, Taiwan, and Mexico. In his current role, he is working to change the business and supply change through changes in PDTE and FA by driving machine learning using data available from semiconductor test to train models and automate processes.
Prior to joining QUALCOMM, Michael held engineering roles at several companies, including Mostek, INMOS and Honeywell. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University.
5:15-6:15pm - AI-Ready Infrastructure and Deployment of AI Solutions
Talk 1: Chen He, NXP: Beyond the AI Demo: Building AI-Ready Infrastructure for Scalable Engineering
Talk 2: Patty Pun, Qualcomm: AI Is Not Magic: Capturing Expertise Without Killing Autonomy
Practical Lessons and Open Questions in Engineering Knowledge Acquisition
6:15-6:30pm - Open Q&A
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The workshop aims to move beyond both AI hype and AI fear. AI can produce impressive results quickly, but fast output does not necessarily mean that a problem has been solved reliably. At the same time, the rapid adoption of AI raises important questions about job content, engineering roles, organizational investment, and future skill requirements.
The goal of the workshop is to help the community identify the right questions to ask, the appropriate criteria for evaluating AI technologies and their impact, and the key uncertainties organizations must consider when making technology, investment, and workforce decisions.
Presentations will be given by industrial practitioners with first-hand experience applying AI in real-world settings. Each session will combine a presentation with an open discussion, and active participation from attendees will be strongly encouraged. The workshop is intended not simply as a forum for presenting results, but as an opportunity for the community to collectively examine what we know, what we do not yet know, and what questions we should be asking next.
Keynote by Michael Campbell, Sr VP of Eng. Qualcomm, Inc.
Title: AI: A Hero's (Test's) Journey
Artificial intelligence is redefining the landscape of semiconductor engineering, creating new opportunities to address increasing device complexity, accelerating product cycles, and unprecedented growth in engineering data. This session explores the evolving role of technology, analytics, and intelligent systems in modern test and product engineering, highlighting how organizations are adapting to meet the demands of next-generation silicon development. Attendees will gain insights into emerging industry trends, practical applications, and the changing relationship between engineers, data, and advanced computational tools. Through a combination of real-world examples and industry perspectives, the presentation examines how innovation is reshaping engineering workflows, improving operational efficiency, and enabling teams to tackle increasingly complex challenges.
Michael Campbell is Senior Vice President of Engineering for QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies, (QCT), where he leads Product and Test Engineering, Test Automation, Failure Analysis, and Yield.
Michael joined Qualcomm in 1996. At Qualcomm, Michael has led teams across multiple areas of the business including Design Automation, FA, Yield Optimization, Product Development & Test Engineering (PDTE), Foundry Semiconductor Analysis, and Quality. Since 2014 he has been driving ML & AI test optimization internally & externally with key ATE/EDA providers for value-add AI in the test world. His drive has enabled AI boxes at multiple tester companies that enable in line real time AI functions to drive and deliver improvements in test quality and cost.
During his career at Qualcomm, Michael also has brought up Design and Test facilities in Bangalore, Singapore, Taiwan, and Mexico. In his current role, he is working to change the business and supply change through changes in PDTE and FA by driving machine learning using data available from semiconductor test to train models and automate processes.
Prior to joining QUALCOMM, Michael held engineering roles at several companies, including Mostek, INMOS and Honeywell. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University.