14 research outputs found
Design of Power-Efficient Structures of the CAM Cell using a New Approach in QCA Nanoelectronics Technology
Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a new emerging nano-electronic technology. Owing to its many fa-vorable features such as low energy requirements, high speed, and small size, QCA is being actively suggested as a future CMOS replacement by researchers. Many digital circuits have been introduced in QCA technology, most of them aiming to reach the function with optimum construction in terms of area, cell count and power consumption. The memory circuit is the main building block in the digital system therefore the researchers paid attention to design the memory cells with minimum requirements. In this paper, a new methodology is intro-duced to design two forms of CAM cell. The proposed designs required two 2:1 multiplexers, one OR gate and one inverter. The first proposed design reduces the power consumption by 53.3%, 35% and 25.9% at (0.5 Ek, 1 Ek, and 1.5 Ek) while the second design by 53.2%, 31.9% and 20.5% (0.5 Ek, 1 Ek, and 1.5 Ek) respectively
Multiple bit error correcting architectures over finite fields
This thesis proposes techniques to mitigate multiple bit errors in GF arithmetic circuits. As GF arithmetic circuits such as multipliers constitute the complex and important functional unit of a crypto-processor, making them fault tolerant will improve the reliability of circuits that are employed in safety applications and the errors may cause catastrophe if not mitigated.
Firstly, a thorough literature review has been carried out. The merits of efficient schemes are carefully analyzed to study the space for improvement in error correction, area and power consumption.
Proposed error correction schemes include bit parallel ones using optimized BCH codes that are useful in applications where power and area are not prime concerns. The scheme is also extended to dynamically correcting scheme to reduce decoder delay. Other method that suits low power and area applications such as RFIDs and smart cards using cross parity codes is also proposed. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed techniques can mitigate single and multiple bit errors with wider
error coverage compared to existing methods with lesser area and power consumption. The proposed scheme is used to mask the errors appearing at the output of the circuit irrespective of their cause.
This thesis also investigates the error mitigation schemes in emerging technologies (QCA, CNTFET) to compare area, power and delay with existing CMOS equivalent. Though the proposed novel multiple error correcting techniques can not ensure 100% error mitigation, inclusion of these techniques
to actual design can improve the reliability of the circuits or increase the difficulty in hacking crypto-devices. Proposed schemes can also be extended to non GF digital circuits
Novel Defect Terminolgy Beside Evaluation And Design Fault Tolerant Logic Gates In Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata
Quantum dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is one of the important nano-level technologies for implementation of both combinational and sequential systems. QCA have the potential to achieve low power dissipation and operate high speed at THZ frequencies. However large probability of occurrence fabrication defects in QCA, is a fundamental challenge to use this emerging technology. Because of these various defects, it is necessary to obtain exhaustive recognition about these defects. In this paper a complete survey of different QCA faults are presented first. Then some techniques to improve fault tolerance in QCA circuits explained. The effects of missing cell as an important fault on XOR gate that is one of important basic building block in QCA technology is then discussed by exhaustive simulations. Improvement technique is then applied to these XOR structures and then structures are resimulated to measure their fault tolerance improvement due to using these fault tolerance technique. The result show that different QCA XOR gates have different sensitivity against this fault. After using improvement technique, the tolerance of XOR gates have been increased, furthermore in terms of sensitivity against this defect XORs show similar behavior that indicate the effectiveness of improvement have been made
Performance analysis of fault-tolerant nanoelectronic memories
Performance growth in microelectronics, as described by Moore’s law, is steadily
approaching its limits. Nanoscale technologies are increasingly being explored as a
practical solution to sustaining and possibly surpassing current performance trends of
microelectronics. This work presents an in-depth analysis of the impact on performance,
of incorporating reliability schemes into the architecture of a crossbar molecular switch
nanomemory and demultiplexer. Nanoelectronics are currently in their early stages, and
so fabrication and design methodologies are still in the process of being studied and
developed. The building blocks of nanotechnology are fabricated using bottom-up
processes, which leave them highly susceptible to defects. Hence, it is very important that
defect and fault-tolerant schemes be incorporated into the design of nanotechnology
related devices.
In this dissertation, we focus on the study of a novel and promising class of
computer chip memories called crossbar molecular switch memories and their
demultiplexer addressing units. A major part of this work was the design of a defect and
fault tolerance scheme we called the Multi-Switch Junction (MSJ) scheme. The MSJ scheme takes advantage of the regular array geometry of the crossbar nanomemory to
create multiple switches in the fabric of the crossbar nanomemory for the storage of a
single bit.
Implementing defect and fault tolerant schemes come at a performance cost to the
crossbar nanomemory; the challenge becomes achieving a balance between device
reliability and performance. We have studied the reliability induced performance penalties
as they relate to the time (delay) it takes to access a bit, and the amount of power
dissipated by the process. Also, MSJ was compared to the banking and error correction
coding fault tolerant schemes. Studies were also conducted to ascertain the potential
benefits of integrating our MSJ scheme with the banking scheme. Trade-off analysis
between access time delay, power dissipation and reliability is outlined and presented in
this work.
Results show the MSJ scheme increases the reliability of the crossbar
nanomemory and demultiplexer. Simulation results also indicated that MSJ works very
well for smaller nanomemory array sizes, with reliabilities of 100% for molecular switch
failure rates in the 10% or less range
Fault and Defect Tolerant Computer Architectures: Reliable Computing With Unreliable Devices
This research addresses design of a reliable computer from unreliable device technologies. A system architecture is developed for a fault and defect tolerant (FDT) computer. Trade-offs between different techniques are studied and yield and hardware cost models are developed. Fault and defect tolerant designs are created for the processor and the cache memory. Simulation results for the content-addressable memory (CAM)-based cache show 90% yield with device failure probabilities of 3 x 10(-6), three orders of magnitude better than non fault tolerant caches of the same size. The entire processor achieves 70% yield with device failure probabilities exceeding 10(-6). The required hardware redundancy is approximately 15 times that of a non-fault tolerant design. While larger than current FT designs, this architecture allows the use of devices much more likely to fail than silicon CMOS. As part of model development, an improved model is derived for NAND Multiplexing. The model is the first accurate model for small and medium amounts of redundancy. Previous models are extended to account for dependence between the inputs and produce more accurate results
Quantum Computing and Communications
This book explains the concepts and basic mathematics of quantum computing and communication. Chapters cover such topics as quantum algorithms, photonic implementations of discrete-time quantum walks, how to build a quantum computer, and quantum key distribution and teleportation, among others
Cost-Efficient Soft-Error Resiliency for ASIP-based Embedded Systems
Recent decades have witnessed the rapid growth of embedded systems. At present, embedded systems are widely applied in a broad range of critical applications including automotive electronics, telecommunication, healthcare, industrial electronics, consumer electronics military and aerospace. Human society will continue to be greatly transformed by the pervasive deployment of embedded systems. Consequently, substantial amount of efforts from both industry and academic communities have contributed to the research and development of embedded systems. Application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) is one of the key advances in embedded processor technology, and a crucial component in some embedded systems.
Soft errors have been directly observed since the 1970s. As devices scale, the exponential increase in the integration of computing systems occurs, which leads to correspondingly decrease in the reliability of computing systems. Today, major research forums state that soft errors are one of the major design technology challenges at and beyond the 22 nm technology node. Therefore, a large number of soft-error solutions, including error detection and recovery, have been proposed from differing perspectives. Nonetheless, most of the existing solutions are designed for general or high-performance systems which are different to embedded systems. For embedded systems, the soft-error solutions must be cost-efficient, which requires the tailoring of the processor architecture with respect to the feature of the target application.
This thesis embodies a series of explorations for cost-efficient soft-error solutions for ASIP-based embedded systems. In this exploration, five major solutions are proposed.
The first proposed solution realizes checkpoint recovery in ASIPs. By generating customized instructions, ASIP-implemented checkpoint recovery can perform at a finer granularity than what was previously possible. The fault-free performance overhead of this solution is only 1.45% on average. The recovery delay is only 62 cycles at the worst case. The area and leakage power overheads are 44.4% and 45.6% on average.
The second solution explores utilizing two primitive error recovery techniques jointly. This solution includes three application-specific optimization methodologies. This solution generates the optimized error-resilient ASIPs, based on the characteristics of primitive error recovery techniques, static reliability analysis and design constraints. The resultant ASIP can be configured to perform at runtime according to the optimized recovery scheme. This solution can strategically enhance cost-efficiency for error recovery.
In order to guarantee cost-efficiency in unpredictable runtime situations, the third solution explores runtime adaptation for error recovery. This solution aims to budget and adapt the error recovery operations, so as to spend the resources intelligently and to tolerate adverse influences of runtime variations. The resultant ASIP can make runtime decisions to determine the activation of spatial and temporal redundancies, according to the runtime situations. At the best case, this solution can achieve almost 50x reliability gain over the state of the art solutions.
Given the increasing demand for multi-core computing systems, the last two proposed solutions target error recovery in multi-core ASIPs. The first solution of these two explores ASIP-implemented fine-grained process migration. This solution is a key infrastructure, which allows cost-efficient task management, for realizing cost-efficient soft-error recovery in multi-core ASIPs. The average time cost is only 289 machine cycles to perform process migration. The last solution explores using dynamic and adaptive mapping to assign heterogeneous recovery operations to the tasks in the multi-core context. This solution allows each individual ASIP-based processing core to dynamically adapt its specific error recovery functionality according to the corresponding task's characteristics, in terms of soft error vulnerability and execution time deadline. This solution can significantly improve the reliability of the system by almost two times, with graceful constraint penalty, in comparison to the state-of-the-art counterparts