Extending the Lifetime of Coarse-Grained Runtime Reconfigurable FPGAs by Balancing Processing Element Usage

Abstract

Contemporary coarse-grained runtime reconfigurable architectures (CGRRAs) are increasingly sensitive to aging effects such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). To address this, we propose a reliability-aware floorplanner for CGRRAs based on a mixed Linear Programming (LP) and Integer Linear Programming (ILP) method that extends the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of CGRRAs by balancing processing element (PE) usage. We use this as the basis of a design space explorer that generates a variety of configurations, trading off PE displacement vs. MTTF. On average, a 2.4× improvement in MTTF was obtained for an average critical path delay increase of under 2 percent (although most benchmarks had no delay increase) compared to the default lifetime unaware floorplan.