Maximizing the fault-tolerance of application specific programmable signal processors

Abstract

As witnessed by their rapid market growth, application specific programmable processors (ASSP) provide an attractive alternative to both fully programmable and fully custom hardware platforms. ASPP are data paths which provide efficient implementation for any of k functional specifications assuming that only one will be executed at any given time. We combine the flexibility provided by multiple functionalities with judicious operation-to-application allocation to maximize the permanent fault-tolerance of such ASPP designs. The approach and the synthesis algorithms are demonstrated on a number of signal processing applications.