DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project performs research on the design of future reliable Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). These are systems that guarantee continuous and correct operation in the existence of different types of faults. It is a well known fact that various systems are extremely sensitive to faults; typical examples are medical embedded systems, in which a single malfunction will put the life of a patient in danger.

However, as semiconductor technology scales, chips are becoming ever less reliable; prominent reasons for this phenomenon are the sheer number of transistors on a given silicon area and their shrinking device features. As a consequence, fault tolerance, provided through various redundancy schemes, comes at an enormous increase in power cost and performance overheads. To make matters worse, power-density is becoming a significant limiting factor for performance and SoC design in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault-tolerance are expected to introduce an excessive overhead in future SoCs.

At the increasing fault-rates, expected in the upcoming technology generations, DeSyRe will develop new design techniques for future SoCs, improving their reliability and reducing their power and performance overheads for fault-tolerance.