Implications of Reliability Enhancement Achieved by Fault Avoidance on Dynamically Reconfigurable Architectures

Fault avoidance methods on dynamically reconfigurable devices have been proposed to extend device life-time, while their quantitative comparison has not been sufficiently presented. This paper shows results of quantitative life-time evaluation by simulating fault avoidance procedures of representative five methods under the same conditions of wear-out scenario, application and device architecture. Experimental results reveal 1) MTTF is highly correlated with the number of avoided faults, 2) there is the efficiency difference of spare usage in five fault avoidance methods, and 3) spares should be prevented from wear-out not to spoil life-time enhancement.