Harvest rate of reconfigurable pipelines

Yield analysis for reconfigurable structures is often difficult, due to the defect distribution and irregularity of reconfiguration algorithms. In this paper, the authors give a method to analyze the yield of reconfigurable pipelines for the following model: Given n pipelines with m stages, where each stage of a pipeline is defective with constant probability and spare wires are provided for reconfiguration, the authors calculate the expected percentage of pipelines they can harvest after reconfiguration. By modeling the `shifting´ reconfiguration as weighted chains in a lattice and applying poset theory, they give upper and lower bounds for the harvest rate as a function of m and n