Design for Dependability in Emerging Technologies LUCIAN PRODAN, MIHAI UDRESCU, OANA BONCALO, and MIRCEA VLADUTIU Politehnica University of Timisoara As current microelectronics will reach their physical limits within the foreseeable future, emerging technologies may offer a solution for maintaining the trends to increase computing performance. Biologically-inspired and quantum computing represent two emerging technology vectors for novel computing architectures within nanoelectronics. However, potential benefits will come at the cost of increased device sensitivity to the surrounding environment. This article provides a dependabil- ity perspective over these technologies from a designer’s standpoint. Maintaining or increasing the dependability of unconventional computational processes is discussed in two different contexts, a bio-inspired computing architecture (the Embryonics project) and a quantum computational archi- tecture (the QUERIST project). Categories and Subject Descriptors: B.8.1 [Performance and Reliability]: Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance; C4 [Performance of Systems]: Fault-tolerance, reliability, availability, and serviceability General Terms: Design, Reliability, Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: Dependability, emerging technologies, evolvable hardware, bio-inspired computing, bio-inspired digital design, Embryonics, reliability, quantum computing, fault-tolerance assessment ACM Reference Format: Prodan, L., Udrescu, M., Boncalo, O., and Vladutiu, M. 2007. Design for dependability in emerging technologies. ACM J. Emerg. Technol. Comput. Syst. 3, 2, Article 6 (July 2007), 24 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1265949.1265952 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1265949.1265952 1. INTRODUCTION As modern life has come to rely extensively on computers, their accurate and fast operation is expected. From the very start, a major aim of computer de- signers was to achieve any additional performance that was possible; they are now focusing their priority on dependable delivery of best performance. Author’s address: L. Prodan, Politehnica University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania; email: lpro- dan@cs.upt.ro. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. C  2007 ACM 1550-4832/2007/07-ART6 $5.00. DOI 10.1145/1265949.1265952 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1265949.1265952 ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, Vol. 3, No. 2, Article 6, Publication date: July 2007.