Design and Run-time Reliability at the Electronic System Level

The ongoing scaling of CMOS technology facilitates the design of systems with continuously increasing functionality but also raises the susceptibility of these systems to reliability issues. These can for example be caused by high power densities and temperatures. At the moment it is still possible to cope with the posed challenges in an affordable manner. But in the future, a combination of design and run-time measures will become necessary in order to guarantee that reliability guidelines are met. Because of complexity reasons, the Electronic System Level (ESL) is gaining importance as starting point of design. Design alternatives are evaluated at ESL with respect to several design objectives, lately also including reliability. In this paper, the most important phenomena threatening the reliability are introduced and the current status of related research work and tools is presented. After that, a high level design space exploration considering performance, energy and reliability trade-offs in multi-core systems is introduced. Finally, it is shown how reliability can be further improved during run-time by the application of a machine learning system.