Linköping University: Students Alumni Trade and Industry/Society Internal Search
unmbo_RTCSA12

Reliability-Aware Instruction Set Customization for ASIPs with Hardened Logic

Unmesh D. Bordoloi
 
Bogdan Tanasa
Mehdi B. Tahoori
 
Petru Eles Author homepage
Zebo Peng Author homepage
 
Syed Z. Shazli
Samarjit Chakraborty

International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2012), Seoul, Korea, August 19-22, 2012.

ABSTRACT
Application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) allow the designer to extend the instruction set of the base processor with selected custom instructions to tailor-fit the application.In this paper, with the help of a motivational example, we first demonstrate that different custom instructions are vulnerable to faults with varying probabilities. This shows that by ignoring the vulnerability to faults, traditional methods of instruction set customization can provide no guarantees on the reliability of the system. Apart from such inherent disparity in error vulnerability across custom instructions, each custom instruction can have multiple implementation choices corresponding to varying hardened levels. Hardening reduces the vulnerability to errors but this comes at the overhead of area costs and reduced performance gain. In this paper, we propose a framework to select custom instructions and their respective hardening levels such that reliability is optimized while the performance gain is satisfied and area costs are met as well. Our framework is based on a novel analytical method to compute the overall system reliability based on the probability of failure of individual instructions. Wide range of experiments that were conducted illustrate how our tool navigates the design space to reveal interesting tradeoffs.


Related files:
unmbo_RTCSA12.pdfAdobe Acrobat portable document


[DTBE12] Unmesh D. Bordoloi, Bogdan Tanasa, Mehdi B. Tahoori, Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, Syed Z. Shazli, Samarjit Chakraborty, "Reliability-Aware Instruction Set Customization for ASIPs with Hardened Logic", International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2012), Seoul, Korea, August 19-22, 2012.
( ! ) perl script by Giovanni Squillero with modifications from Gert Jervan   (v3.1, p5.2, September-2002-)