Dependability of VLSI for Applications in Social Information Infrastructure

Our daily lives heavily depends on the social information infrastructure, which includes a huge numbers of VLSI chips. Various system failures are caused by physical faults in the circuits, human errors in design/fabrication/operation and malicious attacks. In this paper, the causes and countermeasures of failures of VLSI are summarized. The discussion leads a new direction of researches of design technology of dependable VLSI. New approaches of theory and implementation of dependable VLSI for social information infrastructures are introduced. As an example of social information systems, e-money systems are discussed in detail.