DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

Design and Programming Methods for Reconfigurable Multi-Core Architectures using a Network-on-Chip-Centric Approach

A current trend in the semiconductor industry is the use of Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) for a wide variety of applications such as image processing, automotive, multimedia, and robotic systems. Most applications gain performance advantages by executing parallel tasks on multiple processors due to the inherent parallelism. Moreover, heterogeneous structures provide high performance/energy efficiency, since application-specific processing elements (PEs) can be exploited. The increasing number of heterogeneous PEs leads to challenging communication requirements. To overcome this challenge, Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have emerged as scalable on-chip interconnect. Nevertheless, NoCs have to deal with many design parameters such as virtual channels, routing algorithms and buffering techniques to fulfill the system requirements. This thesis highly contributes to the state-of-the-art of FPGA-based MPSoCs and NoCs. In the following, the three major contributions are introduced. As a first major contribution, a novel router concept is presented that efficiently utilizes communication times by performing sequences of arithmetic operations on the data that is transferred. The internal input buffers of the routers are exchanged with processing units that are capable of executing operations. Two different architectures of such processing units are presented. The first architecture provides multiply and accumulate operations which are often used in signal processing applications. The second architecture introduced as Application-Specific Instruction Set Routers (ASIRs) contains a processing unit capable of executing any operation and hence, it is not limited to multiply and accumulate operations. An internal processing core located in ASIRs can be developed in C/C++ using high-level synthesis. The second major contribution comprises application and performance explorations of the novel router concept. Models that approximate the achievable speedup and the end-to-end latency of ASIRs are derived and discussed to show the benefits in terms of performance. Furthermore, two applications using an ASIR-based MPSoC are implemented and evaluated on a Xilinx Zynq SoC. The first application is an image processing algorithm consisting of a Sobel filter, an RGB-to-Grayscale conversion, and a threshold operation. The second application is a system that helps visually impaired people by navigating them through unknown indoor environments. A Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor scans the environment, while Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) measure the orientation of the user to generate an audio signal that makes the distance as well as the orientation of obstacles audible. This application consists of multiple parallel tasks that are mapped to an ASIR-based MPSoC. Both applications show the performance advantages of ASIRs compared to a conventional NoC-based MPSoC. Furthermore, dynamic partial reconfiguration in terms of relocation and security aspects are investigated. The third major contribution refers to development and programming methodologies of NoC-based MPSoCs. A software-defined approach is presented that combines the design and programming of heterogeneous MPSoCs. In addition, a Kahn-Process-Network (KPN) –based model is designed to describe parallel applications for MPSoCs using ASIRs. The KPN-based model is extended to support not only the mapping of tasks to NoC-based MPSoCs but also the mapping to ASIR-based MPSoCs. A static mapping methodology is presented that assigns tasks to ASIRs and processors for a given KPN-model. The impact of external hardware components such as sensors, actuators and accelerators connected to the processors is also discussed which makes the approach of high interest for embedded systems

An Automated Design-flow for FPGA-based Sequential Simulation

In this paper we describe the automated design flow that will transform and map a given homogeneous or heterogeneous hardware design into an FPGA that performs a cycle accurate simulation. The flow replaces the required manually performed transformation and can be embedded in existing standard synthesis flows. Compared to the earlier manually translated designs, this automated flow resulted in a reduced number of FPGA hardware resources and higher simulation frequencies. The implementation of the complete design flow is work in progress.\u

Mapeo estático y dinámico de tareas en sistemas multiprocesador, basados en redes en circuito integrado

RESUMEN: Las redes en circuito integrado (NoC) representan un importante paradigma de uso creciente para los sistemas multiprocesador en circuito integrado (MPSoC), debido a su flexibilidad y escalabilidad. Las estrategias de tolerancia a fallos han venido adquiriendo importancia, a medida que los procesos de manufactura incursionan en dimensiones por debajo del micrómetro y la complejidad de los diseños aumenta. Este artículo describe un algoritmo de aprendizaje incremental basado en población (PBIL), orientado a optimizar el proceso de mapeo en tiempo de diseño, así como a encontrar soluciones de mapeo óptimas en tiempo de ejecución, para hacer frente a fallos de único nodo en la red. En ambos casos, los objetivos de optimización corresponden al tiempo de ejecución de las aplicaciones y al ancho de banda pico que aparece en la red. Las simulaciones se basaron en un algoritmo de ruteo XY determinístico, operando sobre una topología de malla 2D para la NoC. Los resultados obtenidos son prometedores. El algoritmo propuesto exhibe un desempeño superior a otras técnicas reportadas cuando el tamaño del problema aumenta.ABSTARCT: Due to its scalability and flexibility, Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a growing and promising communication paradigm for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design. As the manufacturing process scales down to the deep submicron domain and the complexity of the system increases, fault-tolerant design strategies are gaining increased relevance. This paper exhibits the use of a Population-Based Incremental Learning (PBIL) algorithm aimed at finding the best mapping solutions at design time, as well as to finding the optimal remapping solution, in presence of single-node failures on the NoC. The optimization objectives in both cases are the application completion time and the network's peak bandwidth. A deterministic XY routing algorithm was used in order to simulate the traffic conditions in the network which has a 2D mesh topology. Obtained results are promising. The proposed algorithm exhibits a better performance, when compared with other reported approaches, as the problem size increases

Design and Performance Analysis of Low Latency Routing Algorithm based NoC for MPSoC

The Network on Chip is appropriate where System-on-Chip technology is scalable and adaptable. The Network on Chip is a new communication architecture with a number of benefits, including scalability, flexibility, and reusability, for applications built on Multiprocessor System on a Chip (MPSoC). However, the design of efficient NoC fabric with high performance is critically complex because of its architectural parameters. Identifying a suitable scheduling algorithm to resolve arbitration among ports to obtain high-speed data transfer in the router is one of the most significant phases while designing a Network on chip based Multiprocessor System on a Chip. Low latency, throughput, space utilization, energy consumption, and reliability for Network on chip fabric are all determined by the router. The performance of the NoC system is hampered by the deadlock issues that plague conventional routing algorithms. This work develops a novel routing algorithm to address the deadlock problem. In this paper, a deterministic shortest path deadlock-free routing method is developed based on the analysis of the Turn Model. In the 2D-mesh structure, the algorithm uses separate routing methods for the odd and even columns. This minimizes the number of paths for a single channel, congestion, and latency. Two test scenarios—one with and one without a load test—were used to evaluate the proposed model. For a zero-load network, three clock cycles are utilized to transfer the packets. For the load network, five clocks are utilized to transfer the packets. The latency is measured for both cases without load and with load test and the corresponding latency is 3ns and 7ns respectively.The proposed method has an 18.57Mbps throughput.  The area and power utilization for the proposed method are 69% (IO utilization) and 0.128W respectively. In order to validate the proposed method, the latency is compared with existing work and 50% latency is reduced both with and without congestion load