Selectively Fortifying Reconfigurable Computing Device to Achieve Higher Error Resilience

With the advent of 10 nm CMOS devices and “exotic” nanodevices, the location and occurrence time of hardware defects and design faults become increasingly unpredictable, therefore posing severe challenges to existing techniques for error-resilient computing because most of them statically assign har...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mingjie Lin, Yu Bai, John Wawrzynek
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Hindawi Limited 2012-01-01
Series:Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/593532
Description
Summary:With the advent of 10 nm CMOS devices and “exotic” nanodevices, the location and occurrence time of hardware defects and design faults become increasingly unpredictable, therefore posing severe challenges to existing techniques for error-resilient computing because most of them statically assign hardware redundancy and do not account for the error tolerance inherently existing in many mission-critical applications. This work proposes a novel approach to selectively fortifying a target reconfigurable computing device in order to achieve hardware-efficient error resilience for a specific target application. We intend to demonstrate that such error resilience can be significantly improved with effective hardware support. The major contributions of this work include (1) the development of a complete methodology to perform sensitivity and criticality analysis of hardware redundancy, (2) a novel problem formulation and an efficient heuristic methodology to selectively allocate hardware redundancy among a target design’s key components in order to maximize its overall error resilience, and (3) an academic prototype of SFC computing device that illustrates a 4 times improvement of error resilience for a H.264 encoder implemented with an FPGA device.
ISSN:2090-0147
2090-0155