Emulator-oriented tiny processors for unreliable post-silicon devices: A case study

Although various post-silicon devices have been invested in recent years, they still have a major issue of reliability. Because circuit area is an essential factor of reliability, especially for such unreliable post-silicon devices, it is desired to build small circuits which can reuse as many today´s application programs as possible even if the performance is not very high. This paper presents the very first work to study novel, efficient techniques of emulating wider-bit guest processors (e.g., 32-bit) on a narrower-bit host processor (e.g., 8-bit) with very limited hardware resources while mitigating performance degradation. We propose three types of emulator-oriented tiny processors varying in available hardware resources and reliability enhancement approaches. Quantitative evaluation and discussions are done for comparing those three processors. We believe that this work will will be a good help of making breakthrough for further development of new device technologies and computers based on them.