As the size of CMOS devices is scaled down to the nano-scale level, the supply voltage is reduced as well. Noise, however, does not decrease. Interference due to noise can significantly affect circuit performance. Because these faults are random and dynamic in nature, the conventional CMOS design methodology may not be able to handle this problem. We therefore need a new design methodology for handling these errors. Probabilistic-based approaches are very suitable to handle these errors. The uniqueness of this paper is that we utilize the Markov Random Field (MRF) probabilistic-based design methodology for noise-tolerant circuit design. As a proof-of-concept, we have fabricated the world-first MRF chip, an MRF 8-bit adder. The preliminary results show that the noise-immunity of the MRF design can be improved by 28.7dB as compared to conventional CMOS design. In 0.18?m process, the MRF circuit can achieve 10-6 BER under 0.45V supply voltage. In this talk, I will also present our innovative nanoscale design for biomedical applications.

Jie Chen received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta. He is also nominated as a Fellow of National Institution of Nanotechnology. Dr. Chen's research interests include nanoscale circuit design and applying nanotechnology for biomedical applications. Dr. Chen has published over 50 scientific papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He has also co-authored a book on genomic signal processing and another book on circuit and system design for digital video coding. His nanotechnology research is funded by two NSERC, two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and another grant from National Science Council (Taiwan). He is a Distinguished Lecturer in the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (2004-2005), and a senior member of the signal processing society. He has been invited to speak at numerous conferences, workshops and IEEE local chapters. He served as associate editors for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Transaction on Multimedia. He is technical committee chair of IEEE Life Science Systems and Applications. Dr. Chen helped found two Bell-lab spin-offs (one recently acquired by QUALCOM) and he hold 5 patents.