Digital Electronics and Reliability

The research activity of the Digital Electronics and reliability group, concerned some microelectronic issues related to the physics and reliability of non-volatile memory modules. In particular, the research are in the field of electron devices physics and reliability with special emphasis on non-volatile memories both of the floating-gate and post floating-gate generation, and hardware/software co-design through architectural and physical cross-approach techniques for the reliability management of non-volatile memories at system-level in embedded platforms or storage systems such as SSD (Solid State Drives). The activity is both theoretical and experimental. In the first category, there are all the studies related to the interpretation and modeling of some physical phenomena of great interest for nowadays non-volatile memory devices and the statistical characterization of their reliability threats. Several non-conventional measurement techniques have been developed to characterize the devices from a pure experimental level rather than a mere theoretical supposition viewpoint. Recently, it has been started a new research topic on the use of the non-volatile memory at a system-level, with emphasis on the issues related to the reliability and performances management of NAND Flash memories through the co-optimization of the write/erase algorithms and the Error Correction Codes (ECC) engines. This activity has been followed by the study of the SSD architectures, whose storage element is the non-volatile memory medium. The results of the research are carried out in the framework of European projects (H2020-R2RAM, FP7-ATHENIS, FP7-ATHENIS_3D, FP7-GOSSAMMER), obtained in collaboration with international industrial and academic partners (including PMC-Sierra, IHP Microelectronics, Infineon Technologies, AMS, Crocus technology, Numonyx, etc.), and disseminated in premier international journals and conferences.

The research group is composed by:

Piero Olivo (Full professor)

Cristian Zambelli (Assistant professor)

Lorenzo Zuolo (Ph. D. student)

Alessandro Grossi (Ph. D. student)

Rino Micheloni (Ph. D. student)