Variation-Mitigation for Reliable, Dependable and Energy-Efficient Future System Design

Multi-core Devices for Safety-critical Systems

“…This is observable in the development of domain specific case-studies described in Section 4. [35,39,132,48,133,37,49], memory [46,47], cache [46,47], SPM [46,47], shared bus [3,7,134] Table 2: Selected research contributions classification by device abstraction level and fundamental safety technical requirement abstraction levels using different application specific and ad hoc combinations of research contributions (e.g., wind turbine [7,54,6,4,55]). For example, a cross-level approach is required to achieve the DC required by safety standards because, as the complexity continues to increase for device architectures, components and interconnections, meeting the required DC at software application level becomes a challenge if sufficient hardware diagnostic support is not provided [7,36,6].…”

“…• Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) variability: As the technology continues to shrink, manufacturing process variability introduces higher variability of transistor / gates properties with respect to design time properties [32,37,38]. Runtime variability due to PVT and aging, can also lead to transistor / gates variability but at different locations and operational lifetime points of the device [32,37]. This variability can lead to timing failure of circuits if design time margins are exceeded and therefore reduce the device reliability.…”

“…• Temporal diagnosis techniques use dedicated or modified circuit to detect timing errors. For example, Razor provides circuit-level error detection and correction of timing errors with low hardware overhead (e.g., < 3%) [133,37]. It targets the development of power reduction processors where the error rate during operation is monitored to tune the supply voltage.…”

“…As CMOS technology downscales, potentially more transistors can fit on the same silicon die area. However, power, thermal and energy-efficiency constraints limit this potential transistor density increase [37]. This design paradox is referred to as "dark silicon" [201].…”