CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Adaptive Applications and Architectures for Variation-Tolerant Systems

CSR：Small：协作研究：容变系统的自适应应用和架构该奖项由2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公共法律111-5)资助。集成电路(IC)进入纳米制度的规模给设计师带来了新的挑战，其中最重要的是IC组件的特性变化。各种变化可能会削弱技术扩展的基本好处，例如每晶体管成本、性能和功耗的改善。到目前为止，已提出的具有变化意识的设计技术正在达到它们的极限，无法遏制变化的不断增加。因此，重要的是为系统开发新的设计方法，这些方法对底层组件的变化具有内在的弹性。该项目开发了一个基于自适应应用程序和体系结构的框架，用于设计容错特定应用程序系统。它通过(I)在系统架构和应用层采用跨层方法，(Ii)利用固有的弹性？这项工作的目的是：(1)开发一种广泛的应用程序，以适应底层硬件的变化，同时仍能产生可接受的性能并保持终端用户体验；(3)探索混合(设计时和制造后)设计方法，使系统能够更准确、更有效地适应变化。已开发的技术将显著提高我们在不断变化的情况下利用技术扩展的好处的能力。这些努力将产生更广泛的影响，包括与半导体行业合作验证和转移已开发的技术、在SoC设计和嵌入式系统课程中纳入新的教育材料，以及本科生设计项目。

CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Adaptive Applications and Architectures for Variation-Tolerant SystemsThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The scaling of integrated circuits (ICs) into the nanometer regime has thrown up new challenges for designers, foremost among which are variations in the characteristics of IC components. Variations threaten to diminish the fundamental benefits of technology scaling, such as improvements in cost-per-transistor, performance and power consumption. Variation-aware design techniques that have been proposed thus far are being stretched to their limits, and cannot contain the incessant increase in variations. Therefore, it is important to develop new design approaches for systems that are inherently resilient to variations in the underlying components. This project develops a framework based on adaptive applications and architectures for the design of variation-tolerant application-specific systems. It advances the state-of-the-art by (i) adopting a cross-layer approach at the system architecture and application layers, (ii) leveraging the inherent ?elasticity? of a wide class of applications to adapt to variations in the underlying hardware while still producing acceptable performance and maintaining end-user experience, and (iii) exploring a hybrid (design-time and post-fabrication) design methodology, enabling more accurate and effective system adaptation in response to variations. The developed technologies will significantly extend our ability to avail of the benefits of technology scaling in the face of increasing variations.The efforts towards broader impact include working with the semiconductor industry to validate and transfer the developed technologies, new educational material incorporated in courses on SoC design and embedded systems, and undergraduate design projects.