Lifetime Reliability of Systems-on-Chip: Unified Modeling and Dynamic Reliability Management

未来的集成电路将在每个芯片上包含数十个、数百个甚至数千个内核。然而，可以实现这一点的技术缩减也可能会由于越来越多的缺陷和磨损机制而使底层硬件变得不那么可靠。因此，可靠性是多处理器片上系统设计面临的主要问题之一。由于核心或片上网络(用于核心之间的通信)可能成为这些系统的可靠性瓶颈，因此必须以统一的方式解决可靠性问题。为了应对可靠性挑战，本研究提出了一种新的统一的理论寿命可靠性建模框架。该框架基于高效的蒙特卡罗方法，将多处理器片上系统视为计算和通信单元的组合。本研究的目标是开发基于动态电压和频率调节和应用重新映射的新的动态可靠性管理技术。这些技术基于控制论的概念，主动提高多核系统的寿命可靠性。所提出的动态可靠性管理技术使得开发更可靠的多处理器片上系统成为可能，这些系统通过从娱乐和游戏到生物工程、军事和太空的应用对社会产生巨大影响。更广泛地说，该项目的结果通过促进对作为新的设计关注点的可靠性与作为传统目标的功耗、性能和面积之间的权衡的理解，对未来集成系统的设计产生重大影响。

Future integrated circuits will contain tens, hundreds, or even thousand cores per chip. However, technology downscaling that can make this possible may also make the underlying hardware less reliable due to an increasing number of defects and wear out mechanisms. Therefore, one of the major problems facing the design of multiprocessor systems-on-chip is reliability. Because either the cores or the network-on-chip (used for communication between the cores) can become a reliability bottleneck for these systems, it is imperative that the reliability be addressed in a unified manner. To address the reliability challenge, this research develops a novel unified theoretical lifetime reliability modeling framework. This framework is based on efficient Monte Carlo methods to treat multiprocessor systems-on-chip as a combination of computation and communication units. The goal of this research is to develop new dynamic reliability management techniques based on dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and application remapping. Based on control theory concepts, these techniques proactively improve the lifetime reliability of multicore systems.The proposed dynamic reliability management techniques enable the development of more reliable multiprocessor systems-on-chip, which have a dramatic impact on society via applications ranging from entertainment and gaming to bio-engineering, military and space. More broadly, the results of this project impact significantly the design of future integrated systems by advancing the understanding of the tradeoffs between reliability as a new design concern and power consumption, performance and area as traditional objectives.