Thermal challenges to building reliable embedded systems

More and more embedded systems are used in safety-critical areas such as automotive electronics and medical applications. These safety-critical applications impose stringent requirements on reliability, performance, low-power and testability of the underlying VLSI circuits. With silicon technology scaling, however, VLSI circuits operate very often at high temperature, which has negative impact on reliability, performance, power-efficiency and testability. This paper discusses several thermal impacts on VLSI circuits and their related challenges. It presents also a few emerging techniques that take temperature into account in the design and test processes.