Title :
Introducing OVP awareness to achieve an efficient permanent defect locating
Author :
Ahmed, Toufik ; Jun Yao ; Nakashima, Yuta
Author_Institution :
Comput. Archit. Lab., Nara Inst. of Sci. & Technol.(NAIST), Ikoma, Japan
Abstract :
Fault-tolerance now plays an important role in covering the increasing soft/hard error rates in electronic devices that accompany the advances in process technologies. Research shows that wear-out faults have a gradual onset, starting with a timing fault and then eventually leading to a permanent fault. Error detection is thus a required function to maintain execution correctness. Currently, however, many highly dependable methods to cover permanent faults are commonly over-designed for very frequent checking, due to the lack of the awareness of the potential fault rate in the near future. In this research, we propose a method to lower the cost of locating the permanent defects by introducing an operation vulnerable probability (OVP). Specifically, this method segments a long data-path by means of check instructions which tag the segment with their check results and thus allow the later permanent error locating to be carried out inside the segmented zone. We find that our approach saves 64% energy per 10M executions by setting the OVP threshold at 20%.
Keywords :
CMOS integrated circuits; error detection; fault tolerance; probability; radiation hardening (electronics); OVP awareness; OVP threshold; efficient permanent defect locating; electronic devices; error detection; fault-tolerance; gradual onset; long data-path; operation vulnerable probability; permanent fault; segmented zone; soft-hard error rates; timing fault; very frequent checking; wear-out faults; Arrays; Circuit faults; Error correction codes; Error probability; Logic gates; Microprocessors; FU array; Fault-tolerant computing; Low power; Operation Vulnerable probability;
Conference_Titel :
Nanoscale Architectures (NANOARCH), 2012 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Amsterdam
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4503-1671-2