Reconfigurable architectures are increasingly employed in a large range of embedded applications, mainly due to their ability to provide high performance and high flexibility, combined with the possibility to be tuned according to the specific task they address. Reconfigurable systems are today used in several application areas, and are also suitable for systems employed in safety-critical environments. The actual development trend in this area is focused on the usage of the reconfigurable features to improve the fault tolerance and the self-test and the self-repair capabilities of the considered systems. The state-of-the-art of the reconfigurable systems is today represented by Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors and reconfigurable systems based on partially reconfigurable SRAM-based FPGAs. In this paper, we present an overview and accurate analysis of these two type of reconfigurable systems. The content of the paper is focused on analyzing design features, f ail-safe and reconfigurable features oriented to self-adaptive mitigation and redundancy approaches applied during the design phase. Experimental results reporting a clear status of the test data and fault tolerance robustness are detailed and commented
This paper describes hardware-and software-based self-repair methods and how to combine them in order to obtain hybrid methods. All presented methods are able to handle multiple permanent faults in processors with a statically scheduled data path, e.g. a VLIW processor. They are based on adapting the executed program in the field to the current fault situation. The first method is a simple hardware-based technique. It binds dynamically operations to other execution units. A recently published first software-based method is briefly described, and a new second software-based method is introduced to overcome some weaknesses of the first one. Two hybrid methods are obtained by combining each software-based method with the hardware-based method. A detailed analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each method is given. This includes a reliability analysis, the hardware overhead, the repair time, and the effect of multiple faults on the runtime of an executed application.
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