Hardware/software co-reliability of configurable digital systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the co-effect of hardware and software on the reliability as measured by quality level (or defect level) of configurable multichip module (CMCM) systems. Hardware architecture of CMCM can be configured to accommodate target application design. An application, as provided in a form of software, is partitioned and mapped on the provided configurable hardware. Granularity of an application can be used as a criteria of partitioning and mapping, and can determine the utilization pattern of hardware resources. The utilization pattern of CMCM determines the configuration strategy of available hardware resources based on the application's granularity. Different utilization patterns of an application design on CMCM may result in various impacts on escape tolerance (i.e. the probability to avoid inclusion of hardware resources in the configuration that escaped from testing). A quality level model of CMCM is proposed to capture and trace the co-effect of hardware and software, referred to as co-reliability, with respect to escape-tolerance. Various configuration strategies are proposed and evaluated against various criterion granularity and utilization distributions based on the proposed models and evaluation techniques. Extensive analytical and parametric simulation results are shown.