Design and Implementation Strategy of Adaptive Processor-Based Systems for Error Resilient and Power-Efficient Operation

Abstract

The contemporary computing systems are facing two major challenges: excessive power consumption and susceptibility to faults. In order to take advantage of techniques that efficiently address these challenges, the classic ASIC design flow requires some modifications. In this paper, we present a simple and convenient strategy for design and implementation of processor-based systems using highly configurable, cross-layer framework that encompasses techniques such as Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling (AVFS) and Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR). The proposed strategy augments the conventional design flow with two additional steps to integrate the framework’s hardware building blocks into the system. Such system is then able to dynamically switch between low power and error resilient operation modes according to the current requirements. By following the proposed strategy, we were able to implement processor-based system that significantly reduces the power consumption / increases the soft error resilience while preserving the performance at negligible area overhead of less than 1%.