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

On-Line Dependability Enhancement of Multiprocessor SoCs by Resource Management

This paper describes a new approach towards dependable design of homogeneous multi-processor SoCs in an example satellite-navigation application. First, the NoC dependability is functionally verified via embedded software. Then the Xentium processor tiles are periodically verified via on-line self-testing techniques, by using a new IIP Dependability Manager. Based on the Dependability Manager results, faulty tiles are electronically excluded and replaced by fault-free spare tiles via on-line resource management. This integrated approach enables fast electronic fault detection/diagnosis and repair, and hence a high system availability. The dependability application runs in parallel with the actual application, resulting in a very dependable system. All parts have been verified by simulation

Design of Dynamically Assignmentable TAM Width for Testing Core-Based SOCs

[[abstract]]Test access mechanism (TAM) and testing schedule for system-on-chip (SOC) are challenging problems. Testing schedule must be effective to minimize testing time, under the constraint of test resources. This paper presents a new method based on generalized rectangle packing, as two-dimensional packing. A core cuts into many pieces and utilizes the design of reconfigurable core wrappers, and is dynamic to change the width of the TAM executing the core test. Therefore, a core can utilize different TAM width to complete test[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20061204~20061207[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Singapor

Reconfigurable multiple scan-chains for reducing test application time of SOCs

[[abstract]]We propose an algorithm, based on a framework of reconfigurable multiple scan-chains for a system-on-chip, to minimize test application time. For the framework, the control signal combination causes the computing time to increase exponentially. The algorithm we propose introduces a heuristic control signal selection method to solve this problem. We also minimize the test application time by using the balancing method to assign registers into multiple scan-chains. It could show significant reductions in test application times and computing times.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20050523~20050526[[conferencelocation]]Kobe, Japa

Optimal Test Access Mechanism (TAM) for Reducing Test Application Time of Core-Based SOCs

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on a framework of reconfigurable multiple scan chains for system-on-chip to minimize test application time. The control signal combination causes the computing time increasing exponentially, and the algorithm we proposed introduces a heuristic control signal selecting method to solve this serious problem. We also minimize the test application time by using the balancing method to assign registers into multiple scan chains. The results show that it could significantly reduces both the test application time and the computation time.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙

Polymorphic computing abstraction for heterogeneous architectures

Integration of multiple computing paradigms onto system on chip (SoC) has pushed the boundaries of design space exploration for hardware architectures and computing system software stack. The heterogeneity of computing styles in SoC has created a new class of architectures referred to as Heterogeneous Architectures. Novel applications developed to exploit the different computing styles are user centric for embedded SoC. Software and hardware designers are faced with several challenges to harness the full potential of heterogeneous architectures. Applications have to execute on more than one compute style to increase overall SoC resource utilization. The implication of such an abstraction is that application threads need to be polymorphic. Operating system layer is thus faced with the problem of scheduling polymorphic threads. Resource allocation is also an important problem to be dealt by the OS. Morphism evolution of application threads is constrained by the availability of heterogeneous computing resources. Traditional design optimization goals such as computational power and lower energy per computation are inadequate to satisfy user centric application resource needs. Resource allocation decisions at application layer need to permeate to the architectural layer to avoid conflicting demands which may affect energy-delay characteristics of application threads. We propose Polymorphic computing abstraction as a unified computing model for heterogeneous architectures to address the above issues. Simulation environment for polymorphic applications is developed and evaluated under various scheduling strategies to determine the effectiveness of polymorphism abstraction on resource allocation. User satisfaction model is also developed to complement polymorphism and used for optimization of resource utilization at application and network layer of embedded systems