EReLA: A Low-Power Reliable Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture Processor and Its Irradiation Tests

In this work, facing pressure from both the increasing vulnerability to single event effects (SEEs) and design constraints of the power consumption, we have proposed a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) processor. Our goal is to translate a user programmable redundancy to a guide for balancing energy consumption on the one hand and the reliability requirements on the other. We designed software (SW) and hardware (HW) approaches, coordinating them closely to achieve this purpose. The framework provides several user-assignable patterns of redundancy and the hardware modules to interpret well these patterns. A first version prototype processor, with the name EReLA (Explicit Redundancy Linear Array) has been implemented and manufactured with a 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Stress tests based on alpha particle irradiation were conducted to verify the tradeoff between the robustness and the power efficiency of the proposed schemes.