Continuous Online Self-Monitoring Introspection Circuitry for Timing Repair by Incremental Partial-Reconfiguration (COSMIC TRIP)

Abstract

We show that continuously monitoring on-chip delays at the LUT-to-LUT link level during operation allows a field-programmable gate array to detect and self-adapt to aging and environmental timing effects. Using a lightweight (<4% added area) mechanism for monitoring transition timing, a Difference Detector with First-Fail Latch, we can estimate the timing margin on circuits and identify the individual links that have degraded and whose delay is determining the worst-case circuit delay. Combined with Choose-Your-own-Adventure precomputed, fine-grained repair alternatives, we introduce a strategy for rapid, in-system incremental repair of links with degraded timing. We show that these techniques allow us to respond to a single aging event in less than 190ms for the toronto20 benchmarks. The result is a step toward systems where adaptive reconfiguration on the time-scale of seconds is viable and beneficial.

Dependable DNN Accelerator for Safety-Critical Systems: A Review on the Aging Perspective

“…In the active case, explicit and dynamic redundancy is used to detect and manage the fault effects by mechanisms like detection, localization, adaptation, retraining, or self-healing, which may lead to complexity [46]. For example, in the case of the DNN accelerator, this approach can be used for fault recovery by remapping, error detection, or reconfiguration [47]. Overall, not all failure scenarios can be considered at design time to provide passive or active arrangements.…”

“…4) TE forecasting (TEF) prevents TE occurrence by relying on runtime TEs prediction and monitoring like the Canary circuit [69] or dynamic timing analysis [110]. We have different runtime adaptation mechanisms considering TEF, such as model retraining [95], hardware reconfiguration [47], and DVFS adaption [114]. The Razor is a circuit-level mechanism for timing speculation based on the dynamic detection of critical path errors.…”