The increasing opaqueness of AI and its growing influence on our digital society highlight the necessity for AI-based systems that are trustworthy, accountable, and fair. Previous research emphasizes explainability as a means to achieve these properties. In this paper, we argue that system explainability cannot be achieved without accounting for the underlying hardware on which all digital systems - including AI applications - are realized. As a remedy, we propose the concept of explainable hardware, and focus on chips - which are particularly relevant to current geopolitical discussions on (trustworthy) semiconductors. Inspired by previous work on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), we develop a hardware explainability framework by identifying relevant stakeholders, unifying existing approaches form hardware manufacturing under the notion of explainability, and discussing their usefulness to satisfy different stakeholders' needs. Our work lays the foundation for future work and structured debates on explainable hardware.

翻译：人工智能日益增强的不透明性及其对数字社会不断增长的影响，凸显了构建可信、可问责且公平的基于AI的系统的必要性。以往研究强调可解释性是实现这些属性的关键手段。本文指出，若未考虑支撑所有数字系统（包括AI应用）的底层硬件，则无法实现系统可解释性。为此，我们提出“可解释硬件”的概念，并聚焦于芯片——这一在当今（可信）半导体地缘政治讨论中尤为关键的载体。受可解释人工智能（XAI）先前研究的启发，我们通过识别相关利益方、将硬件制造领域的现有方法统一纳入可解释性框架，并探讨其满足不同利益方需求的效用，从而构建了一个硬件可解释性框架。我们的工作为可解释硬件的后续研究及结构化讨论奠定了基础。