Harvest rate of reconfigurable pipelines

Abstract

Yield analysis for reconfigurable structures is often difficult, due to the defect distribution and irregularity of reconfiguration algorithms. In this paper, the authors give a method to analyze the yield of reconfigurable pipelines for the following model: Given n pipelines with m stages, where each stage of a pipeline is defective with constant probability and spare wires are provided for reconfiguration, the authors calculate the expected percentage of pipelines they can harvest after reconfiguration. By modeling the 'shifting' reconfiguration as weighted chains in a lattice and applying poset theory, they give upper and lower bounds for the harvest rate as a function of m and n.<>