How to Speed-Up Fault-Tolerant Clock Generation in VLSI Systems-on-Chip via Pipelining

Függer, Matthias; Dielacher, Andreas; Schmid, Ulrich

doi:10.1109/edcc.2010.35

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Note the above equalities do not affect this system and can be resolved iteratively once the other variables are fixed. We observe that the right hand side of Inequality (13) is increasing in T 5 , the right hand side of Inequality (15) is increasing in T 3 , and neither T 3 nor T 5 are present in any further inequalities. Hence, we rule that Inequality (14) and Inequality (15) shall be satisfied with equality, i.e.,…”

Section: Timeout Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 76%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Fault-Tolerant Algorithms for Tick-Generation in Asynchronous Logic: Robust Pulse Generation

Dolev

Függer

Lenzen

et al. 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Today's hardware technology presents a new challenge in designing robust systems. Deep submicron VLSI technology introduced transient and permanent faults that were never considered in low-level system designs in the past. Still, robustness of that part of the system is crucial and needs to be guaranteed for any successful product. Distributed systems, on the other hand, have been dealing with similar issues for decades. However, neither the basic abstractions nor the complexity of contemporary fault-tolerant distributed algorithms match the peculiarities of hardware implementations.This paper is intended to be part of an attempt striving to overcome this gap between theory and practice for the clock synchronization problem. Solving this task sufficiently well will allow to build a very robust high-precision clocking system for hardware designs like systems-on-chips in critical applications. As our first building block, we describe and prove correct a novel Byzantine fault-tolerant self-stabilizing pulse synchronization protocol, which can be implemented using standard asynchronous digital logic. Despite the strict limitations introduced by hardware designs, it offers optimal resilience and smaller complexity than all existing protocols.

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Section: Timeout Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…This is expressed by the rather involved transition rule tr(recover, join): T 6 is much smaller than T 7 , but T 6 is of no concern until the node switches to state active and resets T 6 . 15 It remains to explain how nodes agree on resynchronization points.…”

Section: Main Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fault-Tolerant Algorithms for Tick-Generation in Asynchronous Logic: Robust Pulse Generation

Dolev

Függer

Lenzen

et al. 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Note that (i) provides smoother clocks but requires lowjitter input clocks (guaranteed by HEX at least for static crash failures). Alternatively, (iii) pipelining of ticks as in [9] could be used. This would avoid the need for sleeping times and tick separation, but requires additional hardware for locally counting ticks and a considerably more involved self-stabilization analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The only fault-tolerant clock generation approaches for multi-synchronous GALS systems known to us are the Byzantine fault-tolerant DARTS approach [9,10] and our selfstabilizing Byzantine fault-tolerant FATAL algorithm proposed in [5]. However, both approaches are complex and require a fully-connected interconnect topology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hex

Dolev

Függer

Lenzen

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

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We argue that grid structures are a very promising alternative to the standard approach for distributing a clock signal throughout VLSI circuits and other hardware devices. Traditionally, this is accomplished by a delay-balanced clock tree, which distributes the signal supplied by a single clock source via carefully engineered and buffered signal paths.Our approach, termed HEX, is based on a hexagonal grid with simple intermediate nodes, which both control the forwarding of clock ticks in the grid and supply them to nearby functional units. HEX is Byzantine fault-tolerant, in a way that scales with the grid size, self-stabilizing, and seamlessly integrates with multiple synchronized clock sources, as used in multi-synchronous Globally Synchronous Locally Asynchronous (GALS) architectures. Moreover, HEX guarantees a small clock skew between neighbors even for wire delays that are only moderately balanced. We provide both a theoretical analysis of the worst-case skew and simulation results that demonstrate very small typical skew in realistic runs.

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“…For example, traditional clock synchronization [52] built upon the approximate agreement [11] supports sparse resource occupation, but it does not achieve full temporal BFT and may need a lot of rounds for worst-case convergence even in synchronous systems with unbounded clocks. And the clock synchronization solutions [53,65,66] based on simulating the broadcast primitive [60] lack the temporal BFT, too. Other integrated synchronization schemes, such as [67,68,69], still compromise with limited spatial or temporal BFT.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peaceable Self-Stabilizing Byzantine Pulse Synchronization

Yu¹,

Zhu²,

Yang³

2022

Preprint

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For reaching fast and efficient self-stabilizing Byzantine pulse synchronization (SSBPS) upon the bounded-delay message-passing networks, we consider the peaceable SSBPS problem where the resource occupation in the stabilized system is required to be as sparse as possible and the stabilization of the system is required to be as fast as possible. To solve it, the decoupled absorption process and emergency process are investigated under a general framework. The constant-time twostage absorption process and more than one kind of emergency process are provided in integrating the merits of temporal trails, approximate agreements, deterministic and randomized Byzantine agreements, and self-stabilizing protocols. With this, not only SSBPS but self-stabilizing Byzantine clock synchronization can be fast established and efficiently maintained. In the optimalresilient basic solutions, the deterministic linear stabilization time and the stabilized resource occupation are all optimized to those of the underlying primitives, which is optimal in the presence of Byzantine faults under the classical static adversary. In the hybrid solutions, faster stabilization can be expected with a worst-case deterministic stabilization time. In all solutions, the stabilized resource occupation is at most at the order of approximate agreement, which is a good property in considering real-world ultra-high-reliable hard-real-time applications where pulse synchronization is expected to be established before all upper-layer functions and to be efficiently maintained when the upper-layer functions are in service.

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How to Speed-Up Fault-Tolerant Clock Generation in VLSI Systems-on-Chip via Pipelining

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

Fault-Tolerant Algorithms for Tick-Generation in Asynchronous Logic: Robust Pulse Generation

Fault-Tolerant Algorithms for Tick-Generation in Asynchronous Logic: Robust Pulse Generation

Hex

Peaceable Self-Stabilizing Byzantine Pulse Synchronization

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