Printed electronics (PE) is an emerging additive manufacturing technology, enabling flexible and extremely lowcost computing devices for future pervasive computing systems. Given the form factor and limited device count in this technology, Unary Encoding (UE), which encodes values as a sequence of bits (1’s or 0’s) by utilizing the proportion of 1’s in the sequence to represent the corresponding probability, shows great promise for printed technologies targeting resource-constrained applications. However, while UE offers some resilience to noise and variability, explicit error correction is still required to address intrinsic defects and variations in printing technologies to deliver reliable and stable outputs. In this work, we propose an area-efficient analog error correction (AEC) method using UE techniques to deal with sporadic bit errors and environmental noise at runtime. This approach significantly reduces transistor count and area utilization compared to conventional error correction coding (ECC) implementations. For proof of concept, we have shown the applicability of this approach for printed physical unclonable functions (p-PUFs) which have significantly lower reliability than silicon-based counterparts. Moreover, the robustness of the proposed scheme against temperature and voltage fluctuations has also been reported. By applying AEC to the p-PUFs output bitstream, its reliability can be fully restored (statistically 100%) for up to 20% bit error rate.

Printed electronic (PE) can meet the requirements of many application domains with requirements on cost, conformity, and non-toxicity which silicon-based computing systems cannot achieve. A typical computational task to be performed in many of such applications is classification. Therefore, printed Neural Networks (pNNs) have been proposed to meet these requirements. However, PE suffers from high process variations due to low resolution printing in low-cost additive manufacturing. This can severely impact the inference accuracy of pNNs. In this work, we show how a unique feature of PE, namely additive printing can be leveraged to perform in-situ tuning of pNNs to compensate accuracy losses induced by device variations. The experiments show that, even under 30 % variation of the conductances, up to 90 % of the initial accuracy can be recovered.

With ever-increasing transistor density in nanoscale-integrated circuits, the impact of process variations on circuit performance and chip yield becomes dominant. To prevent failures in the field, simulation-based circuit optimization tools are performed during design time as a countermeasure. However, the efficiency of these tools requires accurate modeling of failure probabilities. Especially, for high-sigma problems such as yield estimation of memory cells, which require very high production yield, the failure rate assessment must be highly accurate. Importance sampling (IS) methods are deployed in this context to uncover very rare failure events, which cannot be revealed by standard Monte Carlo methods. Besides a highly accurate yield prediction model, the limited time budget of the simulation-based analysis tools has to be taken into account. Especially in conjunction with yield optimization techniques, the required number of circuit simulations for the failure rate estimation has to be substantially reduced. In this article, we propose a yield optimization method, which is based on a Bayesian optimization (BO) failure rate estimation technique for high-sigma yield extraction. The BO-based IS method is combined with a kernel density estimator for finding the most probable failure events, which have significant contribution to the chip yield. By integration into a global optimization framework, we show how the proposed yield optimization method can be applied to high-sigma yield optimization problems, such as memory cells. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method consumes only 5% circuit simulations to achieve the same optimization effect as the state-of-the-art yield optimizer techniques.

Printed electronics (PE) offers flexible, extremely low-cost, and on-demand hardware due to its additive manufacturing process, enabling emerging ultra-low-cost applications, including machine learning applications. However, large feature sizes in PE limit the complexity of a machine learning classifier (e.g., a neural network (NN)) in PE. Stochastic computing Neural Networks (SC-NNs) can reduce area in silicon technologies, but still require complex designs due to unique implementation tradeoffs in PE. In this paper, we propose a printed mixed-signal system, which substitutes complex and power-hungry conventional stochastic computing (SC) components by printed analog designs. The printed mixed-signal SC consumes only 35% of power consumption and requires only 25% of area compared to a conventional 4-bit NN implementation. We also show that the proposed mixed-signal SC-NN provides good accuracy for popular neural network classification problems. We consider this work as an important step towards the realization of printed SC-NN hardware for near-sensor-processing.

Neuromorphic computing systems have demonstrated many advantages for popular classification problems with significantly less computational resources. We present in this paper the design, fabrication and training of a programmable neuromorphic circuit, which is based on printed electrolytegated field-effect transistor (EGFET). Based on printable neuron architecture involving several resistors and one transistor, the proposed circuit can realize multiply-add and activation functions. The functionality of the circuit, i.e. the weights of the neural network, can be set during a post-fabrication step in form of printing resistors to the crossbar. Besides the fabrication of a programmable neuron, we also provide a learning algorithm, tailored to the requirements of the technology and the proposed programmable neuron design, which is verified through simulations. The proposed neuromorphic circuit operates at 5V and occupies 385mm2of area.

Due to the aggressive technology downscaling, process variations are becoming pre-dominent, causing performance fluctuations and impacting the chip yield. Therefore, individual circuit components have to be designed with very small failure rates to guarantee functional correctness and robust operation. The assessment of high-sigma failure rates however cannot be achieved with conventional Monte Carlo (MC) methods due to the huge amount of required time-consuming circuit simulations. To this end, Importance Sampling (IS) methods were proposed to solve the otherwise intractable failure rate estimation problem by focusing on high-probable failure regions. However, the failure rate could largely be underestimated while the computational effort for deriving them is high. In this paper, we propose an eXtended Bayesian Optimized IS (XBOIS) method, which addresses the aforementioned shortcomings by deployment of an accurate surrogate model (e.g. delay) of the circuit around the failure region. The number of costly circuit simulations is therefore minimized and estimation accuracy is substantially improved by efficient exploration of the variation space. As especially memory elements occupy a large amount of on-chip resources, we evaluate our approach on SRAM cell failure rate estimation. Results show a speedup of about 16x as well as a two orders of magnitude higher failure rate estimation accuracy compared to the best state-of-the-art techniques.

A large number of application domains have requirements on cost, conformity, and non-toxicity that silicon-based computing systems cannot meet, but that may be met by printed electronics. For several of these domains, a typical computational task to be performed is classification. In this work, we explore the hardware cost of inference engines for popular classification algorithms (Multi-Layer Perceptrons, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Logistic Regression, Random Forests and Binary Decision Trees) in EGT and CNT-TFT printed technologies and determine that Decision Trees and SVMs provide a good balance between accuracy and cost. We evaluate conventional Decision Tree and SVM architectures in these technologies and conclude that their area and power overhead must be reduced. We explore, through SPICE and gate-level hardware simulations and multiple working prototypes, several classifier architectures that exploit the unique cost and implementation tradeoffs in printed technologies - a) Bespoke printed classifers that are customized to a model generated for a given application using specific training datasets, b) Lookup-based printed classifiers where key hardware computations are replaced by lookup tables, and c) Analog printed classifiers where some classifier components are replaced by their analog equivalents. Our evaluations show that bespoke implementation of EGT printed Decision Trees has 48.9× lower area (average) and 75.6× lower power (average) than their conventional equivalents; corresponding benefits for bespoke SVMs are 12.8× and Decision outperform 12.7× respectively. Lookup-based Trees their non-lookup bespoke equivalents by 38% and 70%; lookup-based SVMs are better by 8% and 0.6%. Analog printed Decision Trees provide 437× area and 27× power benefits over digital bespoke counterparts; analog SVMs yield 490× area and 12× power improvements. Our results and prototypes demonstrate feasibility of fabricating and deploying battery and self-powered printed classifiers in the application domains of interest.

In many application domains, in particular automotives, guaranteeing a very low failure rate is crucial to meet functional and safety standards. Especially, reliable operation of memory components such as SRAM cells is of essential importance. Due to aggressive technology downscaling, process and runtime variations significantly impact manufacturing yield as well as functionality. For this reason, a thorough memory failure rate assessment is imperative for correct circuit operation and yield improvement. In this regard, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations have been used as the conventional method to estimate the variability induced failure rate of memory components. However, MC methods become infeasible when estimating rare events such as high-sigma failure rates. To this end, importance sampling (IS) methods have been proposed which reduce the number of required simulations substantially. However, existing methods still suffer from inaccuracies and high computational efforts, in particular for high-sigma problems. In this article, we fill this gap by presenting an efficient mixture IS approach based on Bayesian optimization, which deploys a surface model of the objective function to find the most probable failure points. Its advantages include constant complexity independent of the dimensions of design space, the potential to find the global extrema, and the higher trustworthiness of the estimated failure rate by accurately exploring the design space. The approach is evaluated on a 6T-SRAM cell as well as a master-slave latch based on a 28-nm FDSOI process. The results show an improvement in accuracy, resulting in up to 63× better accuracy in estimating failure rates compared to the best state-of-the-art solutions on a 28-nm technology node.

Printed electronics (PE) enables disruptive applications in wearables, smart sensors, and healthcare since it provides mechanical flexibility, low cost, and on-demand fabrication. The progress in PE raises trust issues in the supply chain and vulnerability to reverse engineering (RE) attacks. Recently, RE attacks on PE circuits have been successfully performed, pointing out the need for countermeasures against RE, such as camouflaging. In this article, we propose a printed camouflaged logic cell that can be inserted into PE circuits to thwart RE. The proposed cell is based on three components achieved by changing the fabrication process that exploits the additive manufacturing feature of PE. These components are optically look-alike, while their electrical behaviors are different, functioning as a transistor, short, and open. The properties of the proposed cell and standard PE cells are compared in terms of voltage swing, delay, power consumption, and area. Moreover, the proposed camouflaged cell is fabricated and characterized to prove its functionality. Furthermore, numerous camouflaged components are fabricated, and their (in)distinguishability is assessed to validate their optical similarities based on the recent RE attacks on PE. The results show that the proposed cell is a promising candidate to be utilized in camouflaging PE circuits with negligible overhead.

Advances in printed electronics (PE) enables new applications, particularly in ultra-low-cost domains. However, achieving high-throughput printing processes and manufacturing yield is one of the major challenges in the large-scale integration of PE technology. In this article, we present a programmable printed circuit based on an efficient printed lookup table (pLUT) to address these challenges by combining the advantages of the high-throughput advanced printing and maskless point-of-use final configuration printing. We propose a novel pLUT design which is more efficient in PE realization compared to existing LUT designs. The proposed pLUT design is simulated, fabricated, and programmed as different logic functions with inkjet printed conductive ink to prove that it can realize digital circuit functionality with the use of programmability features. The measurements show that the fabricated LUT design is operable at 1 V.

Due to aggressive technology downscaling, process and runtime variations have a strong impact on the correct functionality in the field as well as manufacturing yield. The assessment of the yield and failure rate is extremely crucial for design optimization. The common practice is to use Monte Carlo simulations in order to account for device variations and estimate failure rate. However, Monte Carlo methods are infeasible for estimating rare events such as high sigma failure rates, and hence, various importance sampling methods have been proposed. In this paper, we present an efficient importance sampling approach based on Bayesian optimization. Its advantages include constant complexity independent of the dimensions of design space, the potential to find the global extrema, and higher trustworthiness of the estimated failure rate. We evaluated the approach on a 6T SRAM cell based on a 28nm FDSOI process. The results show significant speedup and more than two orders of magnitude better accuracy in failure rate estimation, compared to the best state-of-the-art technique.