Coactive scheduling and checkpoint determination during high level synthesis of self-recovering microarchitectures

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems Vol. 2; no. 3; pp. 304 - 311
• Main Authors: Orailoglu, A., Karri, R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.09.1994
• Subjects: Automotive engineering; Checkpointing; Circuit faults; Clocks; Fault detection; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; High level synthesis; Microarchitecture; Very large scale integration
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/92.311639

The growing trend towards VLSI implementation of crucial tasks in critical applications has increased both the demand for and the scope of fault-tolerant VLSI systems. In this paper, we present a self-recovering microarchitecture synthesis system. In a self-recovering microarchitecture, intermediate results are compared at regular intervals, and if correct saved in registers (checkpointing). On the other hand, on detecting a fault, the self-recovering microarchitecture rolls back to a previous checkpoint and retries. The proposed synthesis system comprises of a heuristic and an optimal subsystem. The heuristic synthesis subsystem has two components. Whereas the checkpoint insertion algorithm identifies good checkpoints by successively eliminating clock cycle boundaries that either have a high checkpoint overhead or violate the retry period constraint, the novel edge-based schedule, assigns edges to clock cycle boundaries, in addition to scheduling nodes to clock cycles. Also, checkpoint insertion and edge-based scheduling are intertwined using a flexible synthesis methodology. We additionally show an Integer Linear Programming model for the self-recovering microarchitecture synthesis problem. The resulting ILP formulation can minimize either the number of voters or the overall hardware, subject to constraints on the number of clock cycles the retry period, and the number of checkpoints.< >