Reducing Overheads for Fault-Tolerant Datapaths with Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration

Abstract

As process scaling and transistor count inflation continue, silicon chips are becoming increasingly susceptible to faults. Although FPGAs are particularly vulnerable to these effects, their runtime reconfigurability offers unique opportunities for fault tolerance. This work presents an application combining algorithmic-level error detection with dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) to allow faults manifested within its datapath at runtime to be circumvented at low cost.