The Semiconductor Industry Associates (SIA) estimates that counterfeiting costs the US semiconductor companies $7.5B in lost revenue, and this is indeed a growing global problem. Repackaging the old ICs, selling the failed test parts, as well as gray marketing, are the most dominant counterfeiting practices. Can technology do a better job than lawyers? What are the technical challenges to be addressed? What EDA technologies will work: embedding IP protection measures in the design phase, developing rapid post- silicon certification, or counterfeit detection tools and methods?

By incorporating the chip multi-threading (CMT) and operating system predictive self-healing technologies, the Sun CMT/Solaris based servers are not only cost/performance effective, but also more robust in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) than the X86/Linux servers with similar performance. The differentiators include higher levels of hardware integration, more fault tolerance provisions in processors, the Solaris memory page retirement (MPR), and the Solaris/SPARC processor offlining (PO) capabilities of the CMT/Solaris server. This study applies analytical models, with parameters calibrated by field experience, to quantitatively compare system RAS, against hardware faults, between the CMT/Solaris and X86/Linux servers. The results show significant RAS benefits of the CMT, MPR, and PO technologies.

The high end of high performance computing (HPC) systems is now moving toward petascale deployments, delivering petaflops of computational capacity and petabytes of storage capacity. Interconnection of the sheer number of server nodes in an HPC system plays a vital role in the developments. InfiniBand has emerged as a compelling interconnect technology, and provides more scalability and significantly better cost- performance than any other known protocols. This paper presents a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) modeling and analysis of the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 system, the world's largest standards-based InfiniBand switch, with direct capacity to host up to 3,456 server nodes, against hardware faults. The results show that the system reliability, in terms of connectivity between the server nodes physically connected to the switch, is high for configurations with redundant ports. The study also shows that practicing deferred repair strategies can significantly reduce unscheduled service events and system downtime. Further, the study identifies optimal service strategies by a tradeoff analysis on reliability and availability.