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Description
Title: | Low-cost error detection through high-level synthesis |
Author(s): | Campbell, Keith A |
Advisor(s): | Chen, Deming |
Department / Program: | Electrical & Computer Engineering |
Discipline: | Electrical & Computer Engineering |
Degree Granting Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Degree: | M.S. |
Genre: | Thesis |
Subject(s): | High-level synthesis
Automation error detection scheduling binding compiler transformation compiler optimization pipelining modulo arithmetic logic optimization state machine datapath, control logic shadow logic low cost high performance electrical bugs Aliasing stuck-at faults soft errors timing errors checkpointing rollback recovery post-silicon validation Accelerators system on a chip signature generation execution signatures execution hashing logic bugs nondeterministic bugs masked errors circuit reliability hot spots wear out silent data corruption observability detection latency mixed datapath diversity checkpoint corruption error injection error removal Quick Error Detection (QED) Hybrid Quick Error Detection (H-QED) hybrid hardware/software execution tracing address conversion undefined behavior High-Level Synthesis (HLS) engine bugs detection coverage |
Abstract: | System-on-chip design is becoming increasingly complex as technology scaling enables more and more functionality on a chip. This scaling and complexity has resulted in a variety of reliability and validation challenges including logic bugs, hot spots, wear-out, and soft errors. To make matters worse, as we reach the limits of Dennard scaling, efforts to improve system performance and energy efficiency have resulted in the integration of a wide variety of complex hardware accelerators in SoCs. Thus the challenge is to design complex, custom hardware that is efficient, but also correct and reliable. High-level synthesis shows promise to address the problem of complex hardware design by providing a bridge from the high-productivity software domain to the hardware design process. Much research has been done on high-level synthesis efficiency optimizations. This thesis shows that high-level synthesis also has the power to address validation and reliability challenges through two solutions. One solution for circuit reliability is modulo-3 shadow datapaths: performing lightweight shadow computations in modulo-3 space for each main computation. We leverage the binding and scheduling flexibility of high-level synthesis to detect control errors through diverse binding and minimize area cost through intelligent checkpoint scheduling and modulo-3 reducer sharing. We introduce logic and dataflow optimizations to further reduce cost. We evaluated our technique with 12 high-level synthesis benchmarks from the arithmetic-oriented PolyBench benchmark suite using FPGA emulated netlist-level error injection. We observe coverages of 99.1% for stuck-at faults, 99.5% for soft errors, and 99.6% for timing errors with a 25.7% area cost and negligible performance impact. Leveraging a mean error detection latency of 12.75 cycles (4150x faster than end result check) for soft errors, we also explore a rollback recovery method with an additional area cost of 28.0%, observing a 175x increase in reliability against soft errors. Another solution for rapid post-silicon validation of accelerator designs is Hybrid Quick Error Detection (H-QED): inserting signature generation logic in a hardware design to create a heavily compressed signature stream that captures the internal behavior of the design at a fine temporal and spatial granularity for comparison with a reference set of signatures generated by high-level simulation to detect bugs. Using H-QED, we demonstrate an improvement in error detection latency (time elapsed from when a bug is activated to when it manifests as an observable failure) of two orders of magnitude and a threefold improvement in bug coverage compared to traditional post-silicon validation techniques. H-QED also uncovered previously unknown bugs in the CHStone benchmark suite, which is widely used by the HLS community. H-QED incurs less than 10% area overhead for the accelerator it validates with negligible performance impact, and we also introduce techniques to minimize any possible intrusiveness introduced by H-QED. |
Issue Date: | 2015-12-08 |
Type: | Text |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89068 |
Rights Information: | Copyright 2015 Keith A. Campbell |
Date Available in IDEALS: | 2016-03-02 |
Date Deposited: | 2015-12 |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
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Dissertations and Theses - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dissertations and Theses in Electrical and Computer Engineering -
Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois