My name is Basab Datta and I am a 3rd yr. Doctoral student in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, pursuing research in the broad area of VLSI Digital Circuit Design under the guidance of Prof. Wayne P. Burleson.
I work as a Graduate Research Assistant in the VLSI Circuits & Systems Group (VCSG). I am actively involved in the SRC project: Circuits for Accurate Thermal Management (of which Prof. Burleson is the PI) developing techniques for accurate on-chip thermal modeling using SPICE, designing & analyzing novel circuits for on-chip thermal sensing, optimizing sensor designs for low-area overhead, low-power overhead & leakage minimization and developing online calibration schemes to provide process-variation tolerance to the thermal sensors.
Under the purview of this task, I studied the temperature effects on an emerging logic-style: sub-threshold logic and proposed a novel low-power, high-sensitivity, sub-threshold thermal sensor. I have explored the temperature effects on on-chip memory and proposed a scheme to extract the temperature information of Content-Addressable-Memory (CAM) cells. As a physical cooling solution I have explored the usage of metal dummy fills and quantified their effectiveness in terms of temperature planarization.
My current research pursuit is the development of circuit-level predictive macro-models of long-terms NBTI-induced delay degradation which will assist in online reliability monitoring. The proposed circuit-aging prediction scheme will be a collaborative effort between the on-chip sensing resources (thermal sensors, process sensors and NBTI sensors) and the macro-models developed previously.