VOLTaiRE: A Fault Tolerant VLIW Design With On-line Property Checking for Reconfigurable Datapaths
ثبت نشده
چکیده
Verification and reliability are emerging as bottlenecks in processor design as aggressive technology scaling and continued architectural innovations enable to perform high speed complex operations. In this context we present VOLTaiRE, a ”VLIW processor with OnLine Testing and REconfigurability” that guarantees reliable functionality of the execution units even in the presence of manufacturing, logical and transient errors. VOLTaiRE has online property checkers that monitor the correctness of the execution units using novel property checking techniques. If any of the units are identified to be faulty, the processor ceases to use that unit and reconfigures the data path to function with the other units. VOLTaiRE trades off performance for accuracy in the reconfigured mode. We have quantified the coverage provided by the online checkers and 92% coverage for all the execution units is assured. The chip has been designed in 0.18um TSMC process using semi-custom and synthesized blocks. Simulations indicate that the overhead associated with the property checkers in terms of area and power is found to be minimal.
منابع مشابه
On Feasibility of Adaptive Level Hardware Evolution for Emergent Fault Tolerant Communication
A permanent physical fault in communication lines usually leads to a failure. The feasibility of evolution of a self organized communication is studied in this paper to defeat this problem. In this case a communication protocol may emerge between blocks and also can adapt itself to environmental changes like physical faults and defects. In spite of faults, blocks may continue to function since ...
متن کاملConfigurable Fault-Tolerance for a Configurable VLIW Processor
This paper presents the design and implementation of configurable fault-tolerance techniques for a configurable VLIW processor. The processor can be configured for 2, 4, or 8 issue-slots with different types of execution functional units (FUs), and its instruction set architecture (ISA) is based on the VEX ISA. Separate techniques are employed to protect different modules of the processor from ...
متن کاملAn Integrated Fault-Tolerant Design Framework for VLIW Processors
In this study, a fault-tolerant design framework of VLIW processor is proposed. Specifically, this paper concentrates on the issue of dependable data path design. We first use three identical functional modules in the data paths to demonstrate our fault-tolerant technique. Basically, we add one spare module in this illustration and refine on the concepts of triple modular redundancy and compari...
متن کاملExperimental Assessment of Fault Coverage for Fault-Tolerant High-Performance Processors
⎯ In this paper, we present a comprehensive experimental assessment of fault coverage for a fault-tolerant VLIW processor, which consists of the error detection, error rollback recovery and reconfiguration mechanisms. We implement the proposed design of fault-tolerant VLIW in VHDL and employ the fault injection to investigate the effects of fault duration, workload variation and the number of r...
متن کاملFault-Tolerant VLIW Processor Design and Error Coverage Analysis
In this paper, a general fault-tolerant framework adopting a more rigid fault model for VLIW data paths is proposed. The basic idea used to protect the data paths is that the execution result of each instruction is checked immediately and if errors are discovered, the instruction retry is performed at once to overcome the faults. An experimental architecture is developed and implemented in VHDL...
متن کامل