On the field design bug tolerance on a multi-core processor using FPGA

Abstract

In recent times, with increased transistor density, it is impossible to verify all the components exhaustively for different scenarios. This results in design bugs also known as extrinsic hardware faults to escape into the processor chip in spite of various levels of testing. Hence, handling design bugs efficiently on the field is a necessity in modern multi-core processors. In this paper, an architecture and algorithm for self-repairing of design bugs in the data path using FPGA is proposed. The FPGA is re-configured during the run-time to take over the functions of the faulty component. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed design a representative sample of five faults are injected and handled. The proposed design's area overhead and time overhead calculations are done using Cadence ncverilog and gem5 simulator respectively. The area overhead of the proposed design is < 1% and performance improvement is around 2.5% compared to the existing techniques.