CESG Seminar: Sunil Khatri

Friday, September 1, 2023
10:20 a.m. – 11:10 a.m. (CST)
ETB 1020, In-Person Presentation Only

Sunil Khatri
Professor at Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Texas A&M University

Title: “Flash – the ‘Overlooked’ Technology”

Talking Points:

Flash technology has historically been used for non-volatile memory
Can flash be used for digital, analog and mixed-signal circuits also?
This talk posits that it can, and thus holds great promise for VLSI circuit design broadly

Abstract

Flash has been the workhorse technology for non-volatile memories for many years now. In this talk, I show that flash technology can be used to design a variety of general-purpose circuits, both digital and analog. This is demonstrated via case studies that demonstrate two styles of flash-based ASIC design (including a secure variant), flash-based convolutional neural network accelerators (both analog and digital variants), flash-based in-memory computing designs, as well as flash-based analog circuits like DACs and LDOs. Through these studies, we demonstrate several advantages of flash-based designs over conventional CMOS designs,and argue that flash is an overlooked technology in digital and analog design. Some of these advantages of flash are not present in CMOS, such as performance tunability, the ability to counteract circuit aging, the control of speed binning, and the ability to mitigate process variations.

Based on our findings, we posit that the programmability, robustness, stability, and maturity of flash give it a significant edge over the class of “emerging” technologies, making flash a viable technology to eventually replace CMOS. We hope that our body of work on flash will encourage further research and deployment in the arena of scaling flash to smaller process node geometries, thereby allowing flash to become a key technology for digital and analog circuits in the future.

Biography

Dr. Sunil P Khatri received his PhD from UC Berkeley, his MS from UT Austin, and his BS degree from IIT Kanpur (India). He currently serves as a Professor in ECE at Texas A&M University. His research areas are VLSI IC/SOC design (including hardware-based machine intelligence, secure hardware design, classical and quantum logic synthesis, radiation tolerant design and fast clocking), algorithm acceleration using custom hardware, FPGAs and GPUs, and interdisciplinary extensions of these topics to other areas like communication, DSP, IoT and genomics.

He has co-authored the first papers in many areas, resulting in impactful contributions that changed industrial practice in the areas of regular fabric-based VLSI design approaches, cross-talk canceling CODECs to eliminate on-chip and off-chip crosstalk in VLSI bus interconnect, GPU-based acceleration of VLSI CAD algorithms, and high-speed off-chip output drivers with self-adjusting impedance. Dr. Khatri has over 280 peer reviewed publications. Among these papers, 5 received a best paper award while 7 others received best paper nominations.

More on Sunil Khatri: Sunil Khatri (tamu.edu)