RELY - RELIABILITY of SoCs for safety critical applications

Abstract:
Shrinking dimensions of SoCs (Systems-on-Chip) make them increasingly prone to failure. The RELY project aims to set reliability as a main goal through the entire IC design flow. On system level a distributed framework is presented that evaluates sensor and monitoring data and triggers measures to increase the systems reliability. The framework is logically segmented into a local and a system domain for which different Quality-of-Service levels are provided. On circuit level, a built-in test structure is proposed that provides information regarding the degradation and status of the circuit. This approach enables prediction of performance failures due to aging effects. The framework and the cross-abstraction-level approach enable the combination and coordination of different reliability mechanisms. In contrast to individual implementations, coordinated operation can be provided and synergy effects can be utilized to achieve savings in resource costs.