A rapid prototyping system for error-resilient multi-processor systems-on-chip

Static and dynamic variations, which have negative impact on the reliability of microelectronic systems, increase with smaller CMOS technology. Thus, further downscaling is only profitable if the costs in terms of area, energy and delay for reliability keep within limits. Therefore, the traditional worst case design methodology will become infeasible. Future architectures have to be error resilient, i.e., the hardware architecture has to tolerate autonomously transient errors. In this paper, we present an FPGA based rapid prototyping system for multi-processor systems-on-chip composed of autonomous hardware units for error-resilient processing and interconnect. This platform allows the fast architectural exploration of various error protection techniques under different failure rates on the microarchitectural level while keeping track of the system behavior. We demonstrate its applicability on a concrete wireless communication system.