Reliability-Centric Hardware/Software Co-Design

Abstract

This paper proposes a reliability-centric hardware/software co-design framework. This framework operates with a component library that provides multiple alternates for a given task, each of which is potentially different from the others in terms of reliability, performance, and area metrics. The paper also presents an experimental evaluation of the proposed co-design framework using several example designs and a comparison to a conventional co-design method that does not consider reliability. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework can be used to study the tradeoffs between area, performance, and reliability and that it is important to include reliability as a first class parameter in optimization.